"You think Bacchus and Eros?" said Lord Lathkill, with complete seriousness; as if one might have telephoned for them.
"In the best sense," said I. As if we were going to get them from Fortnum and Mason's, at least.
"What exactly is the best sense?" asked Lord Lathkill.
"Ah! The flame of life! There's a dead smell here."
The Colonel fingered his glass with thick, inert fingers, uneasily.
"Do you think so?" he said, looking up at me heavily.
"Don't you?"
He gazed at me with blank, glazed blue eyes, that had deathly yellow stains underneath. Something was wrong with him, some sort of breakdown. He should have been a fat, healthy, jolly old boy. Not very old either: probably not quite sixty. But with this collapse on him, he seemed, somehow, to smell.
"You know," he said, staring at me with a sort of gruesome challenge, then looking down at his wine, "there's more things than we're aware of, happening to us!" He looked up at me again, shutting his full lips under his little grey moustache, and gazing with a glazed defiance.
"Quite!" said I.