How curious it was; and rather tragic, too.  For Hilary, like Lord Evelyn, had known once.  Had Hilary too, in ruining much else of himself, ruined his critical faculties?  And could one really do that and remain ignorant of the fact?  Or would one rather have a lurking suspicion, and therefore be all the more defiantly corroborative of one’s own judgment?  In either case one was horribly to be pitied; but—­but one shouldn’t try to edit art papers.  And yet this couldn’t be conveyed without a lacerating of feelings that was unthinkable.  There was always this about Hilary—­one simply couldn’t bear to hurt him.  He was so easily hurt and so often; life used him so hardly and he felt it so keenly, that it behoved Peter, at least, to insert as many cushions as possible between him and the sharp edges of circumstance.  Peter was remorseful.  He had taken what he should have seen before was an unforgivable line; he had failed abominably in comprehension and decent feeling.  Poor Hilary.  Peter was moved by the old impulse to be extraordinarily nice to him.

They turned out of the Rio della Madonnetta into the narrow rio that was the back approach to the Palazzo Amadeo.  It is a dark little canal, a rio of the poor.  The doors that stood open in the peeling brick walls above the water let out straggling shafts of lamplight and quarrelling voices and singing and the smell of wine.  The steep house walls leant to meet one another from either side; from upper windows the people who hadn’t gone to bed talked across a space of barely six feet.

The gondola crept cautiously under two low bridges, then stopped outside the water-washed back steps of the Palazzo Amadeo.

One pleasant thing about Lord Evelyn’s exquisitely mannered poppe was that one didn’t feel that he was thinking “I am not accustomed to taking my master’s visitors to such low haunts.”  In the first place, he probably was.  In the second, he was not an English flunkey, and not a snob.  He was no more a snob than the Margerisons were, or Lord Evelyn himself.  He deposited them at the Palace back door, politely saluted, and slipped away down the shadowy water-street.

Hilary and Peter stepped up two water-washed steps to the green door, and Peggy opened it from within.  Peggy (Peter occasionally wondered when, if ever, she went to bed) was in the hall, nursing Illuminato, who couldn’t sleep—­a small bundle of scarlet night-shirt and round bullet head, burrowing under his mother’s left arm and staring out from that place of comfort with very bright and wakeful eyes.  When, indeed, it might have been asked, did any of the Margerison family take their rest?  No one of them ever felt or expressed any surprise at finding any other awake and active at any hour of the night.

Peggy looked at her three male infants with her maternal serenity touched with mirth.  There were nearly always those two elements in Peggy’s look—­a motherly sympathy and desire to cheer and soothe, and a glint from some rich and golden store of amusement.