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'No. I like and think good the end to which wine is sometimes the means—the promotion of sympathy between man and man. But in my own case it does not achieve that end, so I neither like it nor think it good for me.'

'Bridey, do stop.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I thought it rather an interesting point.' 'Thank God I went to Eton,' said Sebastian.

After dinner Brideshead said: 'I'm afraid I must take Sebastian away for half an hour. I shall be busy all day tomorrow, and I'm off immediately after the show. I've a lot of papers for father to sign. Sebastian must take them out and explain them to him. It's time you were in bed, Cordelia.'

'Must digest first,' she said. 'I'm not used to gorging like this at night. I'll talk to Charles.'

'"Charles"?' said Sebastian. '"Charles"?' "Mr Ryder" to you, child.'

'Come on Charles.'

When we were alone: she said: 'Are you really an agnostic?'

'Does your family always talk about religion all the time?'

'Not all the time. It's a subject that just comes up naturally, doesn't-it?'

'Does it? It never has with me before.'

'Then perhaps you are an agnostic. I'll pray for you.'

'That's very kind of you.'

'I can't spare you a whole rosary you know. Just a decade. I've got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week.'

'I'm sure it's more than I deserve.'

'Oh, I've got some harder cases than you. Lloyd George and the Kaiser and Olive Banks.'

'Who is she?'

'She was bunked from the convent last term. I don't quite know what for. Reverend Mother found something she'd been writing. D'you know, if you weren't an agnostic, I should ask you for five shillings to buy a black god-daughter.'

'Nothing will surprise me about your religion.'

'It's a new thing a missionary priest started last term. You send five bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you. I've got six black Cordelias already. Isn't it lovely?'

When Brideshead and Sebastian returned, Cordelia was sent to bed. Brideshead began again on our discussion.

'Of course, you are right really,' he said. 'You take art as a means not as an end. That is strict theology, but it's unusual to find an agnostic believing it.'

'Cordelia has promised to pray for me,' I said.

'She made a novena I for her pig' said Sebastian.

'You know all this is very puzzling to me,' I said.

'I think we're causing scandal, said Brideshead.

That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Sebastian, and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of his life. He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.

Brideshead and Cordelia went away; the tents were struck on the show ground, the flags uprooted; the trampled grass began to regain its colour; the month that had started in leisurely fashion came swiftly to its end. Sebastian walked without a stick now and had forgotten his injury.

'I think you'd better come with me to Venice,' he said.

'No money.'

'I thought of that. We live on papa when we get there. The lawyers pay my fare—first class and sleeper. We can both travel third for that.'

And so we went; first by the long, cheap sea-crossing to Dunkirk, sitting all night on deck under a clear sky, watching the grey dawn break over the sand dunes; then to Paris, on wooden seats, where we drove to the Lotti, had baths and shaved, lunched at Foyot's, which was hot and half-empty, loitered sleepily among the shops, and sat long in a café waiting till the time of our train; then in the warm, dusty evening to the Gare de Lyon, to the slow train south, again the wooden seats, a carriage full of the poor, visiting their families—travelling, as the poor do in Northern countries, with a multitude of small bundles and an air of patient submission to authority—and sailors returning from leave. We slept fitfully, jolting and stopping, changed once in the night, slept again and awoke in an empty carriage, with pine woods passing the windows and the distant