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surroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.
    “Goodness,” said Iris, “I do hope that’s not a happy escapee from Kanner’s Circus.” (No relation—at least, so it seemed—to the pianist.)
    We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen times it crossed the looping main road, our path grew wider. That day as usual I argued with Iris about the English names of the few plants I could identify—rock roses and griselda in bloom, agaves (which she called “centuries”), broom and spurge, myrtle and arbutus. Speckled butterflies came and went like quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels of foliage, and once a tremendous olive-green fellow, with a rosy flush somewhere beneath, settled on a thistlehead for an instant. I know nothing about butterflies, and indeed do not care for the fluffier night-flying ones, and would hate any of them to touch me: even the prettiest gives me a nasty shiver like some floating spider web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera, the silver louse.
    On the day now in focus, memorable for a more important matter but carrying all kinds of synchronous triviaattached to it like burrs or incrustated like marine parasites, we noticed a butterfly net moving among the beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swinging on its vest-button string, his white locks flying around his scarlet brow, and the whole of his person still radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we no doubt had heard a minute ago.
    Upon Iris immediately describing to him the spectacular green thing, Kanner dismissed it as
eine
“Pandora” (at least that’s what I find jotted down), a common southern
Falter
(butterfly). “
Aber
(but),” he thundered, raising his index, “when you wish to look at a real rarity, never before observed west of Nieder-Österreich, then I will show what I have just caught.”
    He leant his net against a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked it up reverently) and, with profuse thanks (to Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?) that trailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel a little stamp envelope and shook out of it very gently a folded butterfly onto the palm of his hand.
    After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young Cabbage White. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance,
grow
.)
    “Now look with attention,” said Kanner ignoring her quaint remark and pointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. “What you see is the inferior side—the under white of the left
Vorderflügel
(‘fore wing’) and the under yellow of the left
Hinterflügel
(‘hind wing’). I will not open the wings but I think you can believe what I’m going to tell you. On the upper side, which you can’t see, this species shares with its nearest allies—the Small White and Mann’s White, both common here—the typical little spots of the fore wing, namely a black full stop in the male and a black
Doppelpunkt
(‘colon’) in the female. In those allies the punctuation is reproduced on the underside, and only in the species of which you seea folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing blank beneath—a typographical caprice of Nature!
Ergo
it is an Ergane.”
    One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched.
    “Oh, it’s alive!” cried Iris.
    “No, it can’t fly away—one pinch was enough,” rejoined Kanner soothingly, as he slipped the specimen back into its pellucid hell; and presently, brandishing his arms and net in triumphant farewells, he was continuing his climb.
    “The brute!” wailed Iris. She brooded over the thousand little creatures he had tortured, but a few days later, when Ivor took us to the man’s concert (a most poetical rendition of Grünberg’s suite
Les Châteaux
) she derived some consolation from her brother’s contemptuous remark: “All that butterfly business is only a publicity stunt.” Alas, as a fellow madman I knew better.
    All I had to do when we reached our stretch of
plage
in