wandered to the lusty sunshine of "Lusitanian summers" that was there
imprisoned. I inhaled its fragrance, I accepted its exquisite and
spacious generosity. Wine, like bread and oil--"God's three chief
words"--is a thing of itself--a thing of earth and air and sun--one of
the great natural things, such as the stars and the flowers and the eyes
of a dog. Even the most mouth-twisting new wine of Northern Italy has
its fascination for me, in that it is essentially something apart from
the dust and empty racket of the world; how much more then this radiant
vintage suddenly awakened from its slumber in the darkness of forty
years. So I mused, as I think an honest man is justified in musing,
soberly, over a great wine, when suddenly my left eye caught Adrian's
face. He too was musing; but musing on unhappy things, for a hand seemed
to have swept his face and wiped the joy from it. He was gazing at his
half-emptied glass, with the short stem of which his fingers were
nervously toying. There was a quick snap. The stem broke and the wine
flowed over the cloth. He started, and with a flash the old Adrian came
back, manifesting itself in his smiling dismay, his boyish apology to
Mr. Jornicroft for smashing a rare glass, spoiling the tablecloth and
wasting precious wine. The incident served to disequilibrate, as one
might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia. Coffee came and
liqueurs. I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found myself in heart
to heart conversation with my neighbour on the right, a florid,
simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year's Sheriff of the City of
London, whose consuming ambition was to become a member of the Athenæum
Club. When I informed him that I was privileged to enter that Valley of
Dry Bones--my late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous
Master of Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions,
I think, before I was born--my sugar broker almost fell at my feet and
worshipped me. Although I told him that the premises were overrun with
Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of episcopicide to no avail,