"To the steward?" asked Peggy wonderingly. "But, Mrs. Perrigord, wherever was your husband?"
Mrs. Perrigord's husband, who now seemed to despair of getting back to the serious business of sitting on literary hats, interposed:
"Most refreshing, Miss Glenn. Most refreshing. Ha-ha! I like the outspoken views, the free and untrammelled straightforwardness of our youth to-day, which is not by ancient prejudice cabined, cribbed, and confined… " At this point, Mrs. Perrigord looked as though, if she were not by ancient prejudice cabined, cribbed, and confined, she would up and dot him one with a plate of kippers. "I— in short, I like it. But you must not mind my wife. Ha-ha!"
"Oh?" said Mrs. Perrigord.
"Come, come, Cynthia. Jeunesse, jeunesse. A trifle of exuberant 'seizing the moment,' so to speak. Remember what D. H. Lawrence said to James Joyce. Ha-ha-ha!"
"My deah Leslie," said Mrs. Perrigord coldly, "Babylonian orgies and revels of Ishtar a la Pierre Louys are oil very well in books. But if it is to youah aesthetic taste to have these rites peahfoahmed oil ovah the deck of a respectable linah undah youah window at 2 a.m., I must say I caon't agree. And I must insist on explaining to this young lady that muh relations with the cabin steward were — ah— puahly those of business—"
"Coo!" said Peggy.
"— and were confined," went on Mrs. Perrigord, in a louder voice, "to ringing the bell, unbolting the doah, and asking him whethah (as my husband will inform you) something could be done to stop the noise. I can assuah you that I slept no moah oil night."
Mr. Perrigord said mildly that you had got to remember what James Joyce said to D. H. Lawrence. Morgan felt that he had better do something to culminate this exchange of dirty digs before it reached the hair-pulling stage. All the same, he was aghast. The emerald had to be somewhere. He held no brief for either Lord Sturton or Captain Whistler, but the fact remained that they had pinched a fifty-thousand-pound jewel and thrown it through the porthole of one of those two cabins. If the emerald had somehow incredibly vanished, it meant the vanishing of Sturton's money and probably Whistler's official head. Something was wrong. Kyle said it wasn't in his cabin, and there was testimony to prove the Barber could not have lifted it from there. On the other hand, the Perrigords were awake; noticed the row; would certainly have noticed anything thrown in, and certainly could not have missed it this morning. His bewilderment grew, and he desperately sought for a new lead…
So Morgan assumed his most winning smile (although he felt it stretch like a hideous mask) and spoke flattering, soothing, cajoling words to Mrs. Perrigord. She was not at all bad-looking, by the way; and he went to work with gusto. While Warren stared at him, he sympathised with her and apologised angrily for the behaviour of whatever disgusting revellers had disturbed her sleep. He intimated that, no matter what might have been the conversation between those two notorious old rips James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, it had been in very bad taste.