“Oh, the Mudge-Jervises. Well, they were getting along quite happily, and their married life was one continuous exchange of picture-postcards; and then one day they were thrown together on some neutral ground where foursomes and washerwomen overlapped, and discovered that they were hopelessly divided on the Fiscal Question. They have thought it best to separate, and she is to have the custody of the Persian kittens for nine months in the year⁠—they go back to him for the winter, when she is abroad. There you have the material for a tragedy drawn straight from life⁠—and the piece could be called The Price They Paid for Empire . And of course one would have to work in studies of the struggle of hereditary tendency against environment and all that sort of thing. The woman’s father could have been an Envoy to some of the smaller German Courts; that’s where she’d get her passion for visiting the poor, in spite of the most careful upbringing. C’est le premier pa qui compte , as the cuckoo said when it swallowed its foster-parent. That, I think, is quite clever.”

“And the wolves?”