“You had better tell it to Lady Isobel. I’ve no doubt she would appreciate it.”

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a time when everyone else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats’s poems, but her family denied both stories.

“The rift is widening to an abyss,” said Eleanor to her mother that afternoon.

“I should not tell that to anyone,” remarked her mother, after long reflection.

“Naturally, I should not talk about it very much,” said Eleanor, “but why shouldn’t I mention it to anyone?”

“Because you can’t have an abyss in a lute. There isn’t room.”