same subject,” said Paul.

“Well, then, I did. I used it as a crib for the Alcestis when I was at school.”

“A pretty good crib, too.”

“Very.”

“But the translation of the Alcestis isn’t the whole of the poem, is it? The Alcestis makes things pretty black for Admetus, doesn’t it? You’d call him a bit of a rotter, wouldn’t you? That is, if you take the first surface meaning of the play. But Balaustion found another meaning underneath which transfigures Admetus, turns the black to white. Well, humbly, but just as confidently, I look underneath the first obvious meaning of what I told you. That’s disgrace, isn’t it? Let’s be frank about it! A man in disgrace shunning his friends! There’s the surface reading. And there’s no other—except mine.”

“Let me hear it,” said Mr. Ferguson quickly. He returned to the chair at his table. Here might be, after all, a pleasant way out of this disconcerting interview. “Will you smoke?” he asked, and he held out a tin of cigarettes to his visitor.

“Now fire away!” he said. Mr. Ferguson was in a much more cheerful mood.

Discomfort, however, had not vanished from the room. It had passed from Mr. Ferguson. But it had entered into Paul. He stammered and was shy. Finally he blurted out:

“I find the explanation of everything in my father’s passionate love for my mother.”

Mr. Ferguson’s eyes turned slowly from the plane trees to Paul’s face.

“Will you go on, please?”

“My mother was French.”

“Yes. Virginia Ravenel. She sang for one season at Covent Garden. She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life.” He laughed, tenderly caressing his recollections. “There was a time when I fancied myself your father’s rival. You have a look of her, Mr. Ravenel. She was fair like you,” and he was still musing with pleasure and just a touch of regret upon the pangs and ardours of that long-vanished season of summer and magic, when Paul Ravenel thoroughly startled him.

“I think that my mother died in giving me birth,” he said. “That’s how I explain to myself my father’s distance and uneasiness with me. I was the enemy, and worse than that, 

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