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discussion of Tom Partridge to hear him. In the end Mary had let him in, and they were standing together in the doorway. ‘Who is old Tom Partridge, and what have the laundry-man and his wife been doing?’ He had often the air, when he came to our house, of a child who wanted to be told a story.
    ‘Mamma is saying that people are good and bad because they are born like that,’ explained Richard Quin, ‘and Kate is saying that they are good and bad because they choose to be, she thinks they only do it to annoy because they know it teases.’
    ‘Oh, that is what they are arguing about, are they!’ exclaimed Mr Morpurgo. ‘I can myself make only one small contribution to that argument. I can tell you that it is most unlikely that you will settle it before luncheon. It has been going on elsewhere for some time now. Come, we must start.’

II
    T HE LARGE SQUARE ROOM of Mr Morpurgo’s car trundled us across the Thames and past the Houses of Parliament into the part of London south of Hyde Park, where the squares are faced with stucco and the tall houses are white cliffs round the green gardens; and he grew very cheerful. ‘Now we are near home,’ he said, ‘and I am quite looking forward to meeting my wife at luncheon. Though she has been back for two days I have hardly seen her. Unhappily her journey has given her one of those agonising headaches which are the curse of her life. They make it absolutely impossible for her to talk to anybody, and while they last she simply has to shut herself up in her bedroom and pull down the blinds, and that’s what she has been doing ever since she came back. We had a long talk together on her arrival, and suddenly the old pain started. No, no, there was no question of putting you off. I would have been quite ruthless in asking you to come another day if it had been necessary. But I asked her yesterday evening, and she said that if she dined in bed and took a sleeping draught she would be quite fit for the party today.’
    ‘Travel has been unlucky for you both lately,’ said Mamma. ‘You really looked quite ill when you came back from that Continental journey which you said you hadn’t enjoyed.’
    ‘Ah, yes,’ he sighed, sobered by the memory. ‘But that, as you realised, was because of all the cooking in oil. See, this is where I live, the big house, the very big house, lying crossways at the corner of the square, and not at all in keeping. There is nothing one can do about that. As the Almighty pointed out to Job, nothing can be done about behemoth and leviathan. No, do not get out yet, the footman will open the door.’
    At those last words I was stricken with terror. Like all people brought up in households destitute of menservants, we regarded them as implacable enemies of the human kind, who could implement their ill-will by means of supernatural powers which enabled them to see through a guest’s pretensions as soon as they let him into the house and to denounce him to the rest of the company without the use of speech. We hurried past the footman with our eyes on the ground and thus were unaware till we had entered the hall that this was not just a large house, such as we had expected Mr Morpurgo to possess, it was large like a theatre or a concert-hall. We stood washed by the strong light that poured from a glass dome far above us, on a shining floor set with a geometric pattern of black and white marble squares and triangles and crescents; a staircase swept down with the curve of a broad, slow waterfall; the walls were so wide that one took a tapestry where two armies fought it out on land round a disputed city in the foreground, and in the background two navies fought it out among an archipelago lying where a sea and estuary met; and on the facing wall a towering Renaissance chimneypiece rose into a stone forest honeycombed by several hunts. When Mr Morpurgo had had his hat and coat taken from him, he wheeled round and faced us, his little arms spread out, his