‘Don’t I? . . . Don’t I? . . . Well, perhaps I don’t . . . Maybe I thinks more than I says. Maybe I has my private views . . .’

Oh God, thought Miss Roach, now he was beginning his ghastly I-with-the-third-person business. As if bracing herself for a blow (as she looked at the tablecloth), she waited for more, and more came.

‘I Keeps my Counsel,’ said Mr. Thwaites, in his slow treacly voice. ‘Like the Wise Old Owl, I Sits and Keeps my Counsel.’

Miss Roach, shuddering under this agonisingly Thwaitesian remark – Thwaitesian in the highest and richest tradition – knew well enough that there was more to follow. For it was a further defect of Mr. Thwaites that when he had made a remark which he thought good, which he himself subtly realised as being Thwaitesian, he was unable to resist repeating it, either in an inverted or a slightly altered form. He did not fail to do so on this occasion.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I Keeps my Counsel, like the Wise Old Bird . . . I Happens to keep my Counsel . . . I Happens to be like the Wise Old Bird . . .’

And in the silence that followed, broken only by the scraping of soup-spoons on plates, the whole room, with all its occupants, seemed to have to tremble in hushed reverence before the totally unforeseen and awful Bird which had materialised in its midst – its wisdom and unearthly reticence . . . Miss Roach guessed that honour was now satisfied, and that this would be enough. It was not, however, enough.