Women meant nothing to him, they said, compared with his beloved lions. But Clare found it was one thing to listen to advice -- another thing altogether to follow it! A lion pride is a hunting unit, and this would seem to be its sole reason for existence. And it is the extraordinary dominance of the male lion, and little else, that welds the society together. Robert Ardrey: African Genesis (by permission of Collins Publishers) CHAPTER ONE MRS. FREEMAN poured the tea with a languid hand. This was her third pregnancy and her husband, Luke, had sent her down to the coast for a while ‘to put some flesh on her bones’, as he put it. Kate, happily, one might even say complacently, married for ten years, glanced at my flushed face and smiled. “Have you ever met Hugo Canning?” she asked. “No,” I answered doubtfully. Having reached the age of twenty-five without having been tempted into marriage, I rather resented the matchmaking proclivities of even my dearest married friends. “Ah!”
