'Surely you wouldn't have me wrinkled?'

'Creams and mudbaths are useless. Let me send you for a face-lift to Harold Gillies.'

'If you let me send you for monkey-gland treatment to Professor Voronoff in Monte Carlo.'

'We're not going to Monte.'

'Oh, Eliot! You know London's absolutely empty after Christmas.'

'Don't be cross.' He grinned, dropping his hand. 'There's something worth staying to enjoy. I'm to be made a lord.' She drew in her breath. 'And our eldest son shall become a lord. And his eldest son, and so on for ever and ever. Dawson told me, while we were waiting for the King to die. Oh, we're two real professionals, Dawson and I. He's to be a viscount. The only medical man to reach it. It's the age we live in, isn't it? Ever since MacDonald's Socialist cabinet appeared in their knee-breeches at Buckingham Palace. Or does it prove again that a doctor's reputation depends on the distinction of those dying in his care?'

Nancy kissed him. 'So I'm to be a lady twice over? Well! How do I live it down in the States?'

'You'll be the envy of New York. Americans are crazy on titles. Have you seen the rapture of a bishop from the mid-West called "My lord" at a London dinner party?'

She was sitting upright. 'Everyone will say you did it through my money.'

'I'll tell them that first. No doctor hides the truth. Dawson wants me with him and Lloyd George in Germany next September, to meet Herr Hitler.'

'Surely he's not for those awful Nazis? 'she exclaimed.

'Only on the keep-fit level. He thinks our unemployed should have compulsory physical jerks. Dawson fancies himself as a politician. Well, I did once. We fail, because we imagine everyone's mind as disinfected of emotion as a doctor's. Hitler will make a dreadful fool of him.'

Eliot pulled off the heavy silk-lined tail coat he had been wearing almost twenty-four hours. Nancy asked, 'What was the end like?'