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good and happy you must eat on Sundays roast beef and
rice pudding.’
‘You’ll call when you’re ready for cheese,’ said Sally im-
passively.
‘D’you know the legend of the halcyon?’ said Athelny:
Philip was growing used to his rapid leaping from one sub-
ject to another. ‘When the kingfisher, flying over the sea, is
exhausted, his mate places herself beneath him and bears
him along upon her stronger wings. That is what a man
wants in a wife, the halcyon. I lived with my first wife for
three years. She was a lady, she had fifteen hundred a year,
and we used to give nice little dinner parties in our little
red brick house in Kensington. She was a charming woman;
they all said so, the barristers and their wives who dined
with us, and the literary stockbrokers, and the budding pol-
iticians; oh, she was a charming woman. She made me go
to church in a silk hat and a frock coat, she took me to clas-
sical concerts, and she was very fond of lectures on Sunday
afternoon; and she sat down to breakfast every morning at
eight-thirty, and if I was late breakfast was cold; and she
read the right books, admired the right pictures, and adored
the right music. My God, how that woman bored me! She
is charming still, and she lives in the little red brick house
in Kensington, with Morris papers and Whistler’s etchings
on the walls, and gives the same nice little dinner parties,
with veal creams and ices from Gunter’s, as she did twenty
years ago.’
Philip did not ask by what means the ill-matched couple
had separated, but Athelny told him.

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