“Your taste in broadcast talks is excellent, Lubers,” he said, “but your judgment of literature is, shall we say, peculiar. You wireless people are like the film people. You cannot divest your minds of the idea that popularity spells artistic quality. There was never yet a best-seller that had any claims to being good literature, literature as understood by the cultured. We are interested, Lubers, in Literature with a capital L, not commercial fiction that receives the approval of the common herd.”

“Well, before I go up in smoke and flame, I’m firing my last shot,” Lubers growled. “The greatest best-seller of all time, you will agree, is the Bible, read by the cultured and the illiterate all over the world. The common herd can and does appreciate literature provided it says something worth hearing with the mind.”

Twyford Arundal opened and moved his mouth to mock but not the tiniest sound issued from it. Then he fell off his chair and his forehead came in contact with the edge of a stool. When he had been picked up and put back again, the powder for Blake’s next shot was drenched with the general sympathy for poor Twyford Arundal, who continued to work his mouth without result.

The unpleasantness had cleared by half past eleven, when Ella Montrose said she was going to bed. Everyone seemed ready to retire, and the party moved into the hall and broke up. There Blake asked Wilcannia-Smythe to lock the back door after he left the house for his writing-room.

“Be sure to go to bed, Mervyn,” Ella Montrose advised, and softly laughed. “Don’t go making love over the fence to the extraordinary Miss Pinkney.”

“I would much prefer, my dear Ella, to cut Miss Pinkney’s scrawny throat,” he countered.

Nancy Chesterfield slept soundly all through the night until half past seven the next morning when the maid brought her early tea. She was returning from the bathroom when she met Ella Montrose. Ella was whimpering like a child recovering from punishment. Nancy asked her why she was so upset, but could obtain no explanation, and she took the distraught woman to her own room, where she pacified her.