It was eleven in the morning. Who should come to the door but my sister Hortense.

She was just seventeen and very pretty. We embraced fondly. She was dressed as a smart young lady and not as a schoolgirl. She had brought luggage with her. ‘You’re staying?’ I said.

‘May I? For a few days, anyway. Then we can go home together for Christmas.’

‘I am not,’ I said, ‘going home for Christmas. I have a play to write. I have two plays to touch up with topical references.’

She sat on the settee, yellow with black stripes, and bumped herself up and down to relish its springiness. ‘Golly, you are doing well,’ she said, taking it all in. ‘The rewards of literature.’ She pronounced this with a German accent, so I took it to be a phrase used by one of her nuns.

‘No, dearest Hortense,’ I said. ‘The wages of prostitution, if you know the term.’

‘I know the term all right.’ She looked at me sparkling. It evoked in her sweet innocent young mind images of wholesome sexual freedom and female elegance. She had probably read Mrs Warren’s Profession without understanding it.