It's a '63, isn't it?" Eric asked, as he helped himself
and passed the decanter.

Lord Poynter's discoloured eyes shone with interest for the first time
that night.

"Ah, come now! A kindred spirit!" he wheezed welcomingly. "I'll be
honest with you; I was in two minds whether to give you that wine
to-night. Women don't appreciate it, they're not educated up to it. It
was that or the Jubilee Sandeman, and I'm _not_ an admirer of the
Jubilee wines. Very delicate, very _good_," he cooed, "but--well, you'll
understand me if I call them all _women's_ wines. Now, if you _like_
port, I've a few bottles of '72 Gould Campbell. . . . Johnny, your
grandfather would have had a fit, if he'd seen you trying to drink port
wine with a cigarette in your mouth. Not that it makes much difference,
when people have been smoking all the way through dinner; your palate's
tainted before you come to your wine. People pretend that it makes a
difference whether you approach the tobacco through the wine or the wine
through the tobacco. I don't see it, myself. . . ."

His tongue uncoiled, he soliloquized on wines of the past and present,
as the survivor of a dead generation might dwell dotingly on the great
men and beautiful women of a long life-time. Empire, devolving its cares
upon his shoulders, enabled him--as he explained with sly gusto--to
secure that there should be no inharmonious inruption of coffee and
liqueurs until the sacred wine had been in reverent circulation for
twenty minutes. Half-way through, warming to his new friend, he rang for
a bottle of wood port first known to history in 1823, when it was
already a middle-aged wine, and fortified from every subsequent vintage.

"I don't say you'll like it, but it's an experience," he told Eric with
an air of cunning, respectable conspiracy. "Like a _ve-ery_ dry sherry.
If I may advise you, I would say, 'Drink it as a liqueur'; don't waste
your time on my brandy, I'm afraid I've none fit to offer _you_. There
was a tragedy about my last bottle of the Waterloo. . . ."

He diverged into a long and untidy story about a dinner-party in honour
of a late Austrian Ambassador which coincided with the collapse of his
wife's maid with pneumonia. Eric, listening with half his brain,
wondered whether any one would believe him if he transplanted the room,
the conversation and Lord Poynter into a play; with the other half he
thought of Lady Barbara's advice that he should fall in love, if not
with