It is highly likely that Aunt Jenny would not have related the wedding episode to me in such detail, but, in the armchair in her living room, I reached the conclusion that, just as ulcers are the foe of conversation, so brandy is the ally of imagination, probably one of its trustiest friends. What is certain is that, once his daughter was wed, the lawyer of the "Brotherhood Unlimited Company," a person of innate pragmatism, was able to dispel his boundless fury and put a stop to all the retaliatory actions he had launched against the English oilman before he became his son-in-law. With a huge sponge, he wiped away almost all the black moments of the near past: the kidnapping of Eugenia from the respectable Notre-Dame Pension in Ploiesti, the five-week elopement, the contradictory and wholly insupportable rumors about the life of the lovers (one lady, the wife of Magistrate G., had seen them bathing stark naked in the lake at Cernica Monastery during the holiest moment of the liturgy; a high-ranking officer of the gendarmes maintained that, on repeated occasions and sundry highways, he had failed to stop the red Duessenberg Straight speedster, eight aligned cylinders, 4,900 cc and 265 horse power, which, with Neil at the wheel and Eugenia beside him, would sometimes be doing over a hundred miles an hour; a refined lady, who happened to be the lawyer's mistress, related how she had heard that the lord had lost a fabulous sum at the casino in Constantia, after which, with Eugenia riding piggy-back, a bottle of champagne in his hand, he traversed the sea wall from one end to the other, neighing like a stallion; the administrator of the Vega refinery complained that a large pile of invoices had accumulated on his desk, which the Englishman was late in paying, while in reply to the letter the lawyer had sent Lord Embury he had received a postcard from Vienna, showing none other than the happy couple in front of the Prater Palace; in the end, Mother Theodosia herself, the headmistress of the Notre-Dame Pension in Ploiesti, unable to content herself merely with the immediate expulsion of the girl, also paid a call on the lawyer, to demand imperatively that he, in his capacity as father, citizen and Christian, should put a stop by any means possible to a relationship that had rendered her pupils ill). But as father-in-law of Lord Embury, as opposed to outraged father, the lawyer had become a different man.