"A hundred years ago you'd have watched two hapless cocks slashing each other to death," he retorted. "People were flogged within an inch of their lives. Witch-hunts were hardly out of fashion. Two thousand years ago malefactors were nailed to wooden crosses and left to die, gladiators were set to fight wild beasts...." His voice trembled with exultant, fierce irony, and his dark eyes blazed in the setting of his white face. "Now we're grown so effete that we almost shudder when some upstanding son of Belgium takes a rhinoceros whip and lashes a Congo native till the smashed ribs burst through his flesh." His voice fell as suddenly as it had risen. "Have you ever set eyes on a new-born babe? It's a wonderful thing, so tiny and so perfect, with its little limbs and organs and the marvellous little nails on its toes and fingers.... I think of that beautiful, soft, warm, living creature cherished and fed to manhood, and then flung to the demons for them to torture. I see it torn in pieces by a shell or eaten up by disease. And in the old days we might have seen it stretched on a rack, or broken joint by joint with the wheel and boot...." The sentence died away in a long shudder that shook his whole body. "Come back to the house, George," he cried, jumping down from the parapet. "I've travelled three thousand miles in the last five seconds, all the way to Greece and back, where the Turks used to put hot irons on the chests of their prisoners just to teach them not to be rebels. Ten years ago! Who says this is not the best of all possible worlds?"
I took his arm and walked up the stone steps that joined the three terraces. There was still a light in the drawing-room, and we found Sonia writing letters and smoking a cigarette. The accomplishment was new and precarious. She started as we came in through the window and hastily closed the blotting-book.
"Oh, it's only you!" she exclaimed with relief as she saw us. "I was simply dying for a cig., and I can't smoke in my room, or mother would smell it through the door." She opened the blotter and extracted a rather battered cigarette "I've been writing to a friend of yours, David," she went on teasingly. "Mr. Anthony Crabtree."
"De gustibus non est disputandum," O'Rane answered with a shrug of the shoulders.
"You must translate, please."
"It amuses you and it doesn't hurt him," I suggested.
"Who? David?" She walked over to O'Rane's chair and sat down on the arm of it, bending over him and running her fingers through his fine, black hair. So Delilah may have wooed Samson to slumber, with the same practised touch, the same absence of amateurishness or spontaneity. "I'm very fond of Tony."
O'Rane looked at her with half-closed eyes.
"How old are you, Sonia?" he asked.
"I think you ought to remember. Twenty. And I'm never going to be any more."