"I'm stupid again. Of course. A sonnet on the penis with a tail. Just, very just. Who is your friend?"

"A man tugged many ways – towards respectability, even holiness, towards the dirty suffering life of the holy and unholy city the papal rule has made, on its surface, somewhat dull and conforming. You see, sir, we may love our popes spiritually but, in the secular sphere, be unhappy about them. However. If you want laughter here, you will find it in the obscenity of desperation."

"That," John said, his face glowing in the pianoforte candles, "is a fine phrase, obscenity of desperation is a."

"I will give you a fine word," Gulielmi said, "that you will not find in Dante. It is for the male organ and it is dumpennente. Is not that a fine word?"

"I think," Dr Clark said, in unscotch, "Mr Keats has had enough excitement for the evening. I would say it is time for him to go to his bed."

"Taking with him his lonely dumpennente," John said. He kissed the delicious word. "Duuuuuum - A pendent pen, dumb and in the dumps."

"Yes, you see the way Roman language operates. An n and a d following become a double n. Dumpendente. The origin of course is the Latin dum pendebat. You catch the reference? No?

Stabat mater dolorosa

Apud lignum lachrymosa

Dum pendebat filius."

"An unholy reference, if I may say so," Severn said, unwontedly assertive, the Haydn slow movement evidently not now to be attacked.

"Come, Mr Severn, I take you to be of the Reformed Faith. It is our Stabat Mater, not yours, and we may do blasphemies with it if we will."

"Blasphemy is blasphemy."

"One and indivisible," said John with joy. "Severn gets his Stabat Mater from Haydn or Mozart or somebody. But how wonderful – dum pendebat - while he was hanging. From the cross, from the crotch. But this is exquisite, and in no feathery way. This is the good groiny iron. You've given me a fine present, Mr Gulielmi."