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Irma.'
           This was too much for her.
           'You've never 'believed' in me!' she cried, rising from the table, and a dreadful blush suffusing her perfect skin. 'But I can tell you' - her voice rose to a shrill scream - ''that I'm a lady'! What do you think I want with 'men'? The beasts! I hate them. Blind, stupid, clumsy, horrible, heavy, vulgar things they are. And you're 'one' of them!' she screamed, pointing at her brother, who, with his eyebrows raised a little, was continuing with his drawing of the ostrich from where he had left off. 'And 'you' are one of them! Do you hear me, Alfred, one of 'them'!'
           The pitch of her voice had brought a servant to the door. Unwisely, he had opened it, ostensibly to ask whether she had rung for him, but in reality to see what was going on.
           Irma's throat was quivering like a bowstring.
           'What have ladies to do with men?' she screamed; and then, catching sight of the face of the servant at the door, she plucked a knife from the table and flung it at the face. But her aim was not all it might have been, possibly because she was so involved in being a lady, and the knife impaled itself on the ceiling immediately above her own head, where it gave a perfect imitation of the shuddering of her throat.
           The doctor, adding with deliberation the last vertebra to the tail of the skeleton ostrich, turned his face firstly to the door, where the servant, his mouth hanging open, was gazing spellbound at the shuddering knife.
           'Would you be so kind as to remove your redundant carcass from the door of this room, my man,' he said, in his high, abstracted voice; 'and keep it in the kitchen, where it is paid to do this and that among the saucepans, I believe... would you? No one rang for you. Your mistress' voice, though high, is nothing like the ringing of a bell... nothing at all.'
           The face withdrew.
           'And what's more,' came a desperate cry from immediately below the knife, 'he never comes to see me any more! Never! Never!'
           The doctor rose from the table. He knew she was referring to Steerpike, but for whom she would probably never have experienced the recrudescence of this thwarted passion which had grown upon her since the youth had first dispatched his flattering arrows at her all too sensitive heart.
           Her brother wiped his mouth with a napkin, brushed a crumb from his trousers, and straightened his long, narrow back.
           'I'll sing you a little song,' he said. 'I made it up in the bath last night, ha! ha! ha! ha! - a whimsy little jangle, I tell myself - a whimsy little jangle.'
           He began to move round the table, his elegant white hands folded about one another. 'It went like this, I fancy...' But as he knew she would probably be deaf to what he recited, he took her glass from beside her plate and - 'A little wine is just what you need, Irma dear, before you go to bed - for you are going straight away, aren't you, my spasmic one, to Dreamland - ha, ha, ha! where you can be a lady all night long.'
           With the speed of a professional conjurer he whipped a small packet from his pocket and, extracting a tablet, dropped it into Irma's glass. He decanted a little wine into the glass and handed it to her with the exaggerated graciousness which seldom left him. 'And I will take some myself,' he said, 'and we will drink to each other.'
           Irma had collapsed into a chair, and her long marmoreal face was buried in her hands. Her black glasses, which she wore to protect her eyes from the light, were at a rakish slant across her cheek.
           'Come, come, I am forgetting my promise!' cried the doctor, standing before her, very tall, slender and upright, with that celluloid head of his, all sentience and nervous intelligence, tilted to one side like a bird's.
           'First a quaff of this delicious wine from a vineyard