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René knew perfectly well the answer, why they had never had any serious conversation before. But he affected to be at least as astonished as Percy at that fact. He had looked upon Mary's husband as a man with whom he had so little in common that it was unnecessary to exchange anything more than commonplaces. But René crashed, almost with violence, with a heartiness even exceeding the other's, 'Yes, is it not amazing that all these years we should have been content to discuss the weather, or some child-murder or football-match . . . Marie Laurençin!'

They both laughed, looking around for one of the ubiquitous stylized inanities.

'It is extraordinary,' he went on, 'how something happens . . . and two people begin talking without any social inhibition and are revealed to one another. It is one of the most extraordinary things in life!'

'Absolutely!' Percy noisily responded. 'The most extraordinary.'

'The most! It is like the discovery of Plastic.' René capped the whole matter. 'Just a jolly old milk-bottle, the sort the slovenly housewife leaves hardening away there on a shelf—too damned lazy to wash it out and return it to the milkman, and the stuff brought about by her slack habits is plastic. World-shaking discovery. A universal substance such as the alchemist dreamed of. Tea-trays, false-teeth, cups and saucers, eye-glasses, surgical instruments, flying-machines—all out of a bottle of milk. We have been like the indolent housewife, you and I, Percy. We ought to be damned-well ashamed of ourselves!'