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Mother said grandfather Martin’s poems weren’t altogether nice, and brother Edward dislodged a piece of cake from a tooth and said grandfather Martin was an infernal old bore. So then I turned to the Colonel’s nephew, who at least had had the grace to keep fairly quiet, and asked if he would like to see them and he smiled for the first time, really quite nicely, and said he would, very much.
    “I will say that he handled the little book gently, almost reverently – I don’t think Tony liked it altogether, or him. And then, I don’t quite know why, except that he’d been so horribly superior, I asked him if he would read one of the poems, and he looked at me hard and said yes he would. He read it beautifully. This was the poem:
     
    Sometimes within our fleshly bouts I knew
    An angel moved in you: and then my breath
    Was shortened to brief gasps and I knew death
    To be our dear-beloved, our sweet and true.
    But other days I tuned my rampant lyre
    To all the maddest music of your stringing.
    Rich blasphemies and savage lusts went winging
    Up on the Pegasus of my desire.
    Dear lover, sweetest sweeting, lovely coz,
    What if the joy we felt was transitory?
    Are not our natures animal? and one
    With dogs, who feel no Godhead and no loss?
    Does not our goats’ and monkeys’ sense of fun
    Reveal the farceurs of the human story?
     
    “There was a rather shocked silence, and then Mother said poetry always made her feel quite faint, and Colonel Stone said he still preferred Kipling to these moderns. I was just telling him that grandfather Martin was less modern than Kipling – he died in 1876 – when there was a sudden exclamation behind me. This young man Basingstoke was looking at my little book as though he couldn’t believe his eyes, and that terrible scar of his was twitching away like anything. When I asked him what was the matter, he said he thought the book of poems was a forgery!!
    “Then, there was a great hubbub. Tony was furious – I think he wanted to fight Basingstoke – he doesn’t show to the best advantage, much though I love him, when the situation is at all complex. Colonel Stone kept saying, ‘’Pon my soul, never heard of such a thing.’ Mother was wailing that it couldn’t be true because everybody knew that grandfather Martin wrote the poems, though she thought they shouldn’t be read aloud. I told her not to be silly, because obviously that wasn’t what the young man meant, and Tony asked what the devil he did mean then. I think Basingstoke was rather surprised that everyone seemed so angry. He tried to back out of it and said that he shouldn’t have mentioned such a thing, and we’d better let it drop. Then brother Edward said, I must say rather sensibly, that he couldn’t just say the thing was a forgery and leave it at that, and added typically that the market value of the book must be quite high and if Tony had paid through the nose for something that was worth nothing he would want to know about it. So Basingstoke looked at me (and I must say that with the good side of his profile turned towards you he looks very romantic) and asked if I wanted him to explain. I said I did. And Tony, standing with his legs apart on the hearthrug, glaring at Basingstoke, said, ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got to say,’ rather as if the poor man were a prisoner at the bar.
    “It was really very simple – but awfully interesting – and very quick of him to have noticed it. The publisher’s name on the page of the book that gives its title was Letts and Ableton, Beaulieu Street, London , and the year of publication was given too – 1860. Now, it seemed that this young man Basingstoke is writing a history of publishing in the nineteenth century, and to do that he’s investigating the history of various publishing houses, changes in their policy, the time they began and the time they ceased to publish books – if they aren’t in existence now – and so on. One of the firms he’d