"We’re not. I haven’t seen her or heard her since she paid that bill. This is special. You may remember that when she hired you and we were discussing her, I mentioned a piece about her I had read in a magazine, about the dinner party she throws every year on her first husband’s birthday. With four girls and four men as guests? The girls are unmarried mothers who are being rehabil-"

"I remember, yes. Buffoonery. A burlesque of hospitality. Do you mean you are abetting it?"

"I wouldn’t say abetting it. A man I know named Austin Byne phoned and asked me to fill in for him because he’s in bed with a cold and can’t go. Anyhow, it will give me a fresh outlook. It will harden my nerves. It will broaden my mind."

His eyes had narrowed. "Archie."

"Yes, sir."

"Do I ever intrude in your private affairs?"

"Yes, sir. Frequently. But you think you don’t, so go right ahead."

"I am not intruding. If it is your whim to lend yourself to that outlandish performance, very well. I merely suggest that you demean yourself. Those creatures are summoned there for an obvious purpose. It is hoped that they, or at least one of them, will meet a man who will be moved to pursue the acquaintance and who will end by legitimating, if not the infant already in being, the future produce of the womb. Therefore your attendance there will be an imposture, and you know it. I begin to doubt if you will ever let a woman plant her foot on your neck, but if you do she will have qualities that would make it impossible for her to share the fate of those forlorn creatures. You will be perpetrating a fraud."

I was shaking my head. "No, sir. You’ve got it wrong. I let you finish just to hear it. If that were the purpose, giving the girls a chance to meet prospects, I would say hooray for Mrs Robilotti, and I wouldn’t go. But that’s the hell of it, that’s not it at all. The men are from her own social circle, the kind that wear black ties six nights a week, and there’s not a chance. The idea is that it will buck the girls up, be good for their morale, to spend an evening with the cream and get a taste of caviar and sit on a chair made by Congreve. Of course-"