12 CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



affray enough, fought to the death amid the stuffy en- 

 virons of the Probate, etc.. Division of the High Court. 



Our evening's quietude was temptingly assailed by 

 an invitation from some friends of Kenneth's to dine, 

 and then go on to watch a rehearsal of a musical 

 comedy by the Gibraltar Amateur Thespians. A very 

 hot time of year to be rehearsing anything, I thought ; 

 but it takes more than temperature to damp the 

 ardour of the amateur theatrical, and the finished 

 affair was to be the principal asset in the entertaining 

 programme designed to please some illustrious visitor 

 due in the autumn. 



Femininely unpunctual — the fault of the cab- 

 horse, of course — ^we arrived at the house of our much- 

 talked-of hostess, who came forward to greet us with 

 the graceful contemplative hauteur of a woman who 

 has been called beautiful by the Society papers so 

 often and so systematically that she had come to 

 believe it to be a fact and not merely an optical 

 illusion on the part of the reporter. 



It was quite a wonderful house as houses go in 

 Gibraltar, with family treasures carted out at great 

 trouble and expense from home. The dining-room 

 was done up in what our host called " the Adam's 

 style." So also was our hostess, truly Adamic in the 

 earlier sense of the word. Charles Lamb would have 

 hailed her as a " furniture wife," chosen to suit the 

 apartment. 



Outside the Adam dining-room and the hostess a 

 joyous dilettantism prevailed, and round the square 

 hall hung samples of the pictures without which no 



