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thinking we should come up with a new name. How about the Scottish Saucepan? How do you like that, eh?” He beamed.
    â€œLike what?” Darlington said, an edge to his voice.
    â€œScottish Saucepan! It came to me in the middle of the night. I hadn’t drunk my chocolate before bed, you see, and I couldn’t sleep, and I was thinking about what a clever turn of the tongue you had, and there it was! Came to me in the night, like—like that writing on the wall they talk about in the Bible.”
    â€œThurman, you are an utter ass,” Berwick said.
    Thurman looked mildly offended. He was an English sausage, if sausages came in a peculiar bell shape. He had a dimpled double chin and glinting, small blue eyes. He’d been called an ass so many times that he likely took it as a compliment.
    â€œDon’t you think it has a Darlington ring?” he demanded. “He’s rubbing off on me. All that cleverness, I mean.”
    Darlington turned away. He would be very happy to see the last of Thurman, if only he didn’t need an audience. He was honest enough to know that about himself.
    â€œLet’s see what she’s wearing tonight,” Thurman persisted. “You know all the lads down at the Convent will ask.”
    â€œMy wife tells me that if she hears of me at the Convent again, I’m barred from her company,” Wisley said, speaking for the first time. He was a slender man with a discontented mouth traced by a faint mustache that never grew thicker nor thinner. They had all been at Rugby together, and of the four of them, Wisley had done the best. He had married for money, and even Thurman, who had more money than he had need of, admitted that Wisley had fallen on his feet. His bride was fairly pretty; only the most severe of critics would note that her brows met in the middle. Or that her skin was olive. Darlington, who was the severest of critics, had kept his opinion to himself.
    â€œWhich would be the tragedy?” he asked now. “To be barred from your wife’s company, or from the Convent?”
    â€œIt’s like those old games where there are two doors and one leads to a lion,” Berwick commented.
    â€œI don’t see that,” Wisley said languidly. “My wife is no lion, and the Convent, while a perfectly respectable pub, is growing a bit monotonous.”
    Darlington eyed Wisley. Unless he missed his guess, Wisley’s wife was drawing him away from the group. He knew perfectly well that she didn’t like him. Every time she sawhim, her face took on a closed, calm look that spoke of deep hatred.
    He should probably let Wisley go free, off to a life of mind-numbing domesticity.
    â€œWell, I would never give up the Convent for a wife,” Thurman announced.
    â€œYour wife, should you ever have one, will likely be paying a subsidy to the place to keep you occupied,” Berwick said acidly.
    â€œMy wife will madly adore me,” Thurman said, sounding truly huffy for the first time.
    The worst was that Darlington could see that he believed it. What was he doing with a pack of fools like this?
    Berwick shrugged. “’Tis a tedious subject, but I would warn you, Thurman, that in my experience the only women who engage in mad adoration—other than of themselves, of course—are invariably plain.”
    â€œI could make any woman adore me!” Thurman said shrilly. “It’s all a matter of how you treat her.”
    â€œBut women are so monstrously attracted to beauty,” Berwick said.
    Darlington thought he really ought to intervene. His carefully hewed little circle was disintegrating around him.
    â€œWicked women are,” Thurman said. “But good women, the ones one has to marry, those women are interested in commercial transactions.”
    Darlington recognized that as something he’d said, once upon a time. “I prefer the wicked kind,” he said now. “They’re so much