In the midsummer of that year, I was staying for a long weekend at the country house of one of my uncles. I needed not therefore to be accompanied by a chaperone, for my aunt played that role, or would have done had she been more alert to what was afoot all about her. The dear lady lived in dreamland, however, and this perhaps was all to the good insofar as it concerned my immediate education. The world is made up for the most part of fools and knaves, as the second Duke of Buckingham remarked. He was a writer indeed upon whose pleasantries I would have much cause to ponder in those next few days for it was he who first coined another phrase which was to become commonplace among those who neither knew nor cared about its source: “Ay, now the plot thickens very much upon us.” This-for those whose learning would extend as does my own-occurs in the third act of his play, The Rehearsal.

Among my cousins was one Elaine. Six years my senior, she possessed my own medium height. Her ankles and calves were slender, her thighs well-fleshed as befits a woman. Her development otherwise tended to the “bold,” as we called it, for she more than amply fulfilled her dresses in respect of her breasts and bottom. Her eyes were large and her lips of medium size but slumbrous-a delicious peach of a mouth to kiss, as I was to discover. Infinitely more knowing then than I, she was to teach me much.

I should say that in the grander houses of the time, two distinct types of weekend parties were held. The most general was that at which up to sixty or even seventy people might be invited-invariably during the shooting season. On the whole I found these boring. There were too many people to encounter about the house at odd hours-and sometimes to embarrass one.