"Are you a Celt?"
"Yes; from Cornwall. I think it gives me an instinctive love of the beautiful."
"Those who love beauty make it. I, too, have been a Celt. I was a Celt from my twenty-second till my twenty-fifth year. Then I discovered a very curious fact—two facts."
"What were they?"
"First, that the Celt's love of the beautiful is all bunkum. Second, that the people of these islands are mongrels, bred from the scum of Europe. You can call yourself an Anglo-Saxon, or a Celt, or an Aryan, or a Norman, or a Long-Barrow Palæolith; but if you came from these islands, you are a mongrel, a mongrel of a most chequered kind."
At this instant the door opened suddenly, and the electric light was turned on. In the doorway stood Templeton—a tall, bald, thin-faced man, with foxy moustache and weak eyes. His face showed amazed anger.
"What is this?" he said.
"Let me introduce you," said the lady. "My husband, Mr. Naldrett."
Roger, standing up under the angry gaze of Templeton, was conscious of looking like a fool, in his robe of green silk dragons.
"I don't understand," said Templeton.