Even that didn’t altogether satisfy Irene; I fancy the geography of it puzzled her. She probably thought Kaikobad was an unfashionable German spa, where you’d meet matrimonial bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings. My temper was beginning to slip its moorings by that time. I look rather nice when I lose my temper. (I hoped you would say I lose it very often. I mustn’t monopolise the conversation.)

‘Of course, if you want something really Persian and passionate, with red wine and bulbuls in it,’ I went on to suggest; but she grabbed the book from me.

‘Not for worlds. Nothing with red wine or passion in it. Dear Agatha gave me the album, and she would be mortified to the quick—’

I said I didn’t believe Agatha had a quick, and we got quite heated in arguing the matter. Finally, the Duchess declared I shouldn’t write anything nasty in her book, and I said I shouldn’t write anything in her nasty book, so there wasn’t a very wide point of difference between us. For the rest of the afternoon I pretended to be sulking, but I was really working back to that quatrain, like a fox-terrier that’s buried a deferred lunch in a private flower-bed. When I got an opportunity I hunted up Agatha’s autograph, which had the front page all to itself, and, copying her prim handwriting as well as I could, I inserted above it the following Thibetan fragment:

That Agatha would get on to a yak in company with a lover even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable. I very much doubt if she’d do it with her own husband in the privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I’ve remarked before, should always stimulate the imagination.

By the way, when you asked me the other day to dine with you on the 14th, I said I was dining with the Duchess. Well, I’m not. I’m dining with you.