hastily thrust in, "a sombre background brushed
in to throw your figures into more vivid relief. ARE you not primarily
plastic?"

"I have always maintained," Mrs. Ballinger interposed, "that you
represent the purely objective method--"

Osric Dane helped herself critically to coffee. "How do you define
objective?" she then inquired.

There was a flurried pause before Laura Glyde intensely murmured: "In
reading YOU we don't define, we feel."

Osric Dane smiled. "The cerebellum," she remarked, "is not infrequently
the seat of the literary emotions." And she took a second lump of sugar.

The sting that this remark was vaguely felt to conceal was almost
neutralised by the satisfaction of being addressed in such technical
language.

"Ah, the cerebellum," said Miss Van Vluyck complacently. "The Club took
a course in psychology last winter."

"Which psychology?" asked Osric Dane.

There was an agonising pause, during which each member of the Club
secretly deplored the distressing inefficiency of the others. Only Mrs.
Roby went on placidly sipping her chartreuse. At last Mrs. Ballinger
said, with an attempt at a high tone: "Well, really, you know, it was
last year that we took psychology, and this winter we have been so
absorbed in--"

She broke off, nervously trying to recall some of the Club's
discussions; but her faculties seemed to be paralysed by the petrifying
stare of Osric Dane. What HAD the club been absorbed in lately? Mrs.
Ballinger, with a vague purpose of gaining time, repeated slowly: "We've
been so intensely absorbed in--"

Mrs. Roby put down her liqueur glass and drew near the group with a
smile.

"In Xingu?" she gently prompted.

A thrill ran through the other members. They exchanged confused
glances, and then, with one accord, turned a gaze of mingled relief
and interrogation on their unexpected rescuer. The expression of each
denoted a different phase of the same emotion. Mrs. Plinth was the first
to compose her features to an air of reassurance: after a moment's hasty
adjustment her look almost implied that it was she who had given the
word to Mrs. Ballinger.

"Xingu, of course!" exclaimed the latter with her accustomed promptness,
while Miss Van Vluyck and Laura Glyde seemed to be plumbing the depths
of memory, and Mrs. Leveret, feeling apprehensively for Appropriate
Allusions, was somehow reassured by the uncomfortable pressure of its
bulk against her person.

Osric Dane's change of cou