und
them out, and cornered the entire stock. It was like finding a whelk-
stall in a desert, as she afterwards partially expressed herself. When
the liqueurs began to take effect, she started to give them imitations of
farmyard animals as they know them in Bermondsey. She began with a
dancing bear, and you know Agatha doesn't approve of dancing, except at
Buckingham Palace under proper supervision. And then she got up on the
piano and gave them an organ monkey; I gather she went in for realism
rather than a Maeterlinckian treatment of the subject. Finally, she fell
into the piano and said she was a parrot in a cage, and for an impromptu
performance I believe she was very word-perfect; no one had heard
anything like it, except Baroness Boobelstein who has attended sittings
of the Austrian Reichsrath. Agatha is trying the Rest-cure at Buxton."

"But the tragedy?"

"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?"

"Oh, the wolves would be a sort of elusive undercurrent in the background
that would never be satisfactorily explained. After all, life teems with
things that have no earthly reason. And whenever the characters could
think of nothing brilliant to say about marriage or the War Office, they
could open a window and listen to the howling of the wolves. But that
would be very seldom."

REGINALD ON TARIFFS

I'm not going to discuss the Fiscal Question (said Regina