“Thank you,” said Giles quietly. “Now, whatever else we regret, we shall never regret having come to see you this morning.” He paused. “Setting aside Sentiment, the answer is this. We should like to be able to forget the last three months. As we can’t, we think it better to prevent their becoming six.”
Forsyth inclined his head.
“Very good. Am I to draw up a deed? A deed of separation?”
“Please.”
“What about trustees?”
“Are they a necessary evil? We don’t mind you. In fact, you come under godsends. But the idea of inducting others into our private confessional is peculiarly repugnant.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Katharine. “We three are familiar. If I think Mr. Forsyth a brute, I can ring up and tell him so. I couldn’t do that to a trustee. In fact, the whole arrangement would become stiff, reinforced—like putting bones in a belt.”
“You couldn’t, for instance,” said her husband, “employ that simile. For your information, Forsyth, that’s not a proverb. Below the surface female woman wears a sort of comic cummerbund, four sizes too small. The idea is to displace the vitals. If she wants to shorten her life, she lines it with strips of whalebone, running the wrong way. Thus with the minimum of motion she gets the maximum of pain.”
“That,” said Forsyth uncertainly, “is not admittedly the function of trustees. Still, there are times when they are inconvenient. They certainly tend to cramp the style. Nevertheless . . . I’ll tell you what,” he added suddenly. “If you like, I’ll be your trustee.”
The two raised their eyes to heaven ecstatically.