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if I left Cara to that handsome clod. Poor dear Lucy’s such a snob. I can’t desert the sinking ship, can I? That’s what Lucy is, stinking — sinking, I mean.”
    “How do you mean, sinking?”
    Catchpole looked melancholy, and wagged his
    head. “Age has withered her, and custom staled her infantile — infinite variety. After all, even with all that money, you can’t expect these things to last for ever, can you? I think she’s being very unreasonable. He’s awfully attractive, and after all he’s twenty years younger, and you can’t expect him to stick to one job for the rest of his life, however well he does out of it.”
    “Who are you talking about?”
    “Don’t you know?” Catchpole looked surprised. “Rutley, of course. He’s Lucy’s boyfriend.
    She picked him up on the lot and made
    him into a daytime chauffeur.”
    “I see,” Vachell said slowly, “And now he’s
    beginning to tire of the night-time part of the job?”
    Catchpole nodded. “Poor dear Lucy made an
    awfully stupid mistake. She had to bring a maid, of course, but instead of a hideous old hag she brought an attractive young thing. And now, of course, her precious Rutley has gone and fallen for the lovely Paula.”
    32

CHAPTER
FOUR
    It was nine o’clock before dinner began. The meal was not so difficult as Vachell had expected. Hot baths seemed to have restored everyone to a more mellow frame of mind. They all appeared in heavy silk dressing-gowns over pyjamas and mosquito boots, and ate in the open under the big acacia tree. The night was balmy without being too hot, and a myriad of stars glittered in a cloudless sky.
    The meal was rich and excellent and the champagne superb. Glasses were kept constantly
    replenished by a tall, slim young Somali with a beautiful, disdainful face and a proud bearing whom Vachell identified as Geydi, Lord
    Baradale’s personal boy. He wore a white silk robe with a red sash and a coloured turban. Other
    native servants, deft and silent, came and went with plates and dishes, and miraculously managed to serve the meal hot and steaming from a kitchen fifty yards away.
    Vachell said little, and admired the skill with 33
    which de Mare kept the conversation under full sail but steered it, on occasion, away from the rocks of controversy. A discussion on the coloration of game animals occupied most of the meal.
    Lord Baradale defended the protective theory of coloration vigorously, while de Mare quoted
    Stigand and Selous in support of his contention that the theory, as applied to game in Africa, was in the main a fallacy. All beasts of prey, he pointed out, hunted by smell and not by sight, and in any case at night; and an elaborate system of coloration to avoid natural enemies by daylight was therefore unnecessary. As for man, it was probable that primitive people were to a large extent colourblind and in any case insensitive to tones and
    shades, so that subtleties of markings were equally wasted on them.
    Catchpole joined in with some remarks on the
    contribution of African game to the art of interior decoration. He was designing, he said, a material for curtains based on the colour scheme of Grant’s gazelle, and was planning to launch two new
    shades for sitting-room interiors; one, “Cobus grey”, copied from the coat of the waterbuck, and the other, “Pachyderm pink”, from the inside of the hippopotamus’s nostrils. He was very excited over his discoveries.
    “Africa is so magnificently modern I” he exclaimed, “We’ve neglected it for far too long.
    Now, at last, it will come into its own as a wonderful source of original design in decoration.
    34
    “I saw the Game Warden in Manila,” de Mare
    intervened hastily. “He says we’re to keep a sharp lookout for a gang of Timburu rhino poachers in these parts. They’ve just killed a game scout who was trying to round them up. They’re ugly
    customers, it seems.”
    “But how thrilling!” Catchpole said. “Fancy
    poaching rhinos!