ant to
yawn. But Chloe keeps me going. She is vulgar, but racy. She is also very
kind to me, and insists on coming down to help with theatrical
entertainments in the parish. It is so decent of her that I can't say no,
though she doesn't really fit in awfully well with the O.U.D.S. people,
and the Marlowe Society people, and the others whom I get down for
theatricals. In fact, Elizabethan drama isn't really her touch. However,
the parish prefers Chloe, I need hardly say.

I dined there on Chloe's birthday, October 15th, when we always have a
family gathering. Family and other. But the family is heterogeneous
enough to make quite a good party in itself. It was represented on that
particular evening by my father and Chloe, my young sister Diana, my
brothers Wycombe and Tony, Tony's wife, myself, my uncle Monsignor Juke,
my aunt the Marchesa Centurione and a daughter, and my Aunt Cynthia, who
had recently, on her own fiftieth birthday, come out of a convent in
which she had spent twenty-five years and was preparing to see Life.
Besides the family, there were two or three theatrical friends of
Chloe's, and two friends of my father's--a youngish literary man called
Bryan, and the cabinet minister to whom Tony was secretary, but whom I
will not name, because he might not care for it to be generally known
that he was an inmate of so fast a household.

My Aunt Cynthia, having renounced her vows, and having only a
comparatively short time in which to enjoy the world, the flesh and the
devil, is making the most of it. She has only been out of her convent a
year, but is already a spring of invaluable personal information about
men and manners. She knows everything that is being said of everybody
else, and quite a lot that hasn't even got as far as that. Her Church
interests (undiminished in keenness) provide a store of tales
inaccessible to most of my family and their set (except my Uncle
Ferdinand, of course, and his are mostly Roman not Anglican). Aunt
Cynthia has a string of wonderful stories about Cowley Fathers biting
Nestorian Bishops, and Athelstan Riley pinching Hensley Henson, and so
forth. She is as good as Ronnie Knox at producing or inventing them. I'm
not bad myself, when I like, but Aunt Cynthia leaves me out of sight.

This evening she was full of vim. She usually talks at the top of a very
high and strident voice (I don't know what they did with it at the
convent), and I suddenly heard her screaming to the cabinet