It had been taken yesterday in Double Bay, Sydney. The photographer, wearing a floppy white hat, a white scarf over his mouth, and dark spectacles, had stepped out from an alleyway and gone snap. She had not been quick enough to turn her back, but her jaw had dropped and her left eye had slewed, its habit when rage overtook her. The general effect was that of a gargoyle at the dentist’s: an infuriated gargoyle. The photograph was signed “Strix.”

She beat on the paper with her largish white fist and her rings cut into it. She panted lavishly.

“Wants horsewhipping,” Montague Reece mumbled. He was generally accepted as the Sommita’s established lover, and he filled this role in the manner commonly held to be appropriate, being large, rich, muted, pale, dyspeptic, and negative. He was said to wield a great deal of power in his own world.

“Of course he needs horsewhipping,” shouted his dear one. “But where’s the friend who will go out and do it?” She laughed and executed a wide contemptuous gesture that included all present. The newspaper fluttered to the carpet.

“Personally,” Ben Ruby offered, “I wouldn’t know one end of a horsewhip from the other.” She dealt him a glacial stare. “I didn’t mean to be funny,” he said.

“Nor were you.”

“No.”

A young man of romantic appearance, in a distant chair behind the diva, clasped a portfolio of music to his midriff and said in a slightly Australian voice: “Can’t something be done? Can’t they be sued?”

“What for?” asked Mr. Ruby.

“Well — libel. Look at it, for God’s sake!” the young man brought out. “Well, I mean to say, look!”