'Liz Garrowby doesn't look very impressionable to me. I don't see why Mrs Garrowby should worry.

'Don't you indeed. That boy was making an impression on me in thirty seconds flat and a range of twenty yards, and I'm considered practically incombustible. Besides, I never believed that Liz really fell in love with that stick. She just wanted to bind up his broken heart.

'Was it badly broken?

'Considerably shaken, I should say. Naturally.

'Did you ever act with Marguerite Merriam?

'Oh, yes. More than once. We were together for quite a lengthy run in Walk in Darkness. There's a taxi coming.

'Taxi! What did you think of her?

'Marguerite? Oh, she was mad, of course.

'How mad?

'Ten tenths.

'In what way?

'You mean how did it take her? Oh, a complete indifference to everything but the thing she wanted at the moment.

That isn't madness; that is merely the criminal mind at its simplest.

'Well, you ought to know, my dear. Perhaps she was a criminal manque. What is quite certain is that she was as mad as a hatter and I wouldn't wish even Walter Whitmore a fate like being married to her.

'Why do you dislike the British Public's bright boy so much?

'My dear, I hate the way he yearns. It was bad enough when he was yearning over the thyme on an Aegean hillside with the bullets zipping past his ears-he never failed to let us hear the bullets: I always suspected that he did it by cracking a whip —

'Marta, you shock me.

'I don't, my dear; not one little bit. You know as well as I do. When we were all being shot at, Walter took care that he was safe in a nice fuggy office fifty feet underground. Then when it was once more unique to be in danger, up comes Walter from his little safe office and sits himself on a thymey hillside with a microphone and a whip to make bullet noises with.