“No,” I gasped, coughing.
“Ah, it’s a grand sport!” he said. “Does your husband climb?”
I shook my head.
“What a wonderful woman his aunt, Miss Molyneux, is! I remember meeting her at a whist-drive ten years ago, and she must be now—let me see—what is her age?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, weary after his pommelling and longing for sleep.
“Pardon?”
I felt myself growing hot. “Ninety-eight,” I said hoarsely, at a venture. I did not know how old James’s aunt was, nor whether she climbed.
“Ah, is she so much?” he reflected, swaying on his toes. “That’s a nice little fellow” (pointing to a photograph on the mantelpiece). “Puts me in mind of Prince Olaf. It has a great look of him; don’t you think so? What?”
I nodded and shook my head at the same time, and kicked the bedclothes. My temperature was rising rapidly.
“Ah, thank you,” he said, as Clara came in with the hot water, and then he began washing his hands. I never knew a man use so much soap; it was my special kind at two-and-sixpence a tablet, and he left it in the water while he lathered and messed and went on with the Alpine business. He told me the names of all the mountains he had been up, and the routes by which he had unfortunately come down. He described how splendidly fit one felt tearing down the snow slopes on a toboggan (“I wish you would slide downstairs on what is left of my soap, and have done with it,” I thought). He said that he used to have a touch of bronchitis himself every winter, but it completely left him after a week at Mürren. After we had been all round Switzerland with the soap we came back to one of my favourite towels, which he reduced to something like a bread poultice during a ten minutes’ inquiry as to how many Wagner operas I had heard in my life, and whether my grandmother was the wife of a famous fisherman.