Part + 

I + 

An Evening at Mrs. Aldwinkle’s + 

I + 

The little town of Vezza stands at the confluence of two torrents that come down in two deep valleys from the Apuan mountains. Turbulently⁠—for they still remember their mountain source⁠—the united streams run through the town; silence in Vezza is the continuous sound of running waters. Then, gradually, the little river changes its character; the valley broadens out, soon the hills are left behind and the waters, grown placid as a Dutch canal, glide slowly through the meadows of the coastal plain and mingle with the tideless Mediterranean. + 

Dominating Vezza itself, a bold promontory of hill juts out like a wedge between the two valleys. Near the top of the hill and set in the midst of ilex trees and tall cypresses that rise up blackly out of the misty olives, stands a huge house. A solemn and regular façade, twenty windows wide, looks down over the terraced cypresses and the olive trees on to the town. Behind and above this façade one sees irregular masses of buildings climbing up the slopes beyond. And the whole is dominated by a tall slender tower that blossoms out at the top, after the manner of Italian towers, into overhanging machicolations. It is the summer palace of the Cybo Malaspina, onetime Princes of Massa and Carrara, Dukes of Vezza, and marquesses, counts and barons of various other villages in the immediate neighbourhood. + 

The road is steep that leads up from Vezza to the palace of the Cybo Malaspina, perched on the hill above the town. The Italian sun can shine most powerfully, even in September, and olive trees give but little shade. The young man with the peaked cap and the leather wallet slung over his shoulder pushed his bicycle slowly and wearily up the hill. Every now and then he halted, wiped his face and sighed. It was on an evil day, he was thinking, on a black, black day for the poor postmen of Vezza that the insane old English-woman with the impossible name bought this palace; and a blacker day still when she had elected to come and live in it. In the old days the place had been quite empty. A couple of peasant families had lived in the outhouses; that was all. Not more than one letter a month between them, and as for telegrams⁠—why, there had never been a telegram for the palace in all the memory of man. But those happy days were now over, and what with letters, what with packets of newspapers and parcels, what with expresses and telegrams, there was never a day and scarcely an hour in the day when someone from the office wasn’t toiling up to this accursed house. + 

True, the young man went on thinking, one got a good tip for bringing a telegram or an express. But being a young man of sense, he preferred leisure, if a choice had to be made, to money. The expense of energy was not to be compensated for by the three francs he would receive at the end of the climb. Money brings no satisfaction if one has to work for it; for if one works for it one has no time to spend it. + 

The ideal, he reflected, as he replaced his cap and once more started climbing, the ideal would be to win a big prize in the lottery. A really immense prize. + 

He took out of his pocket a little slip of paper which had been given him only this morning by a beggar in exchange for a couple of soldi. It was printed with rhymed prophecies of good fortune⁠—and what good fortune! The beggar had been very generous. He would marry the woman of his heart, have two children, become one of the most prosperous merchants of his city, and live till eighty-three. To these oracles he gave small faith. Only the last verse seemed to him⁠—though he would have found it difficult to explain why⁠—worthy of serious attention. The last verse embodied a piece of specific good advice. + 

Intanto se vuoi vincere + 

Un bel ternone al Lotto, + 

Giuoca il sette e il sedici, + 

Uniti al cinquantotto. + 

He read through the verse several times until he had got it by heart; then folded up the paper and put it away again. Seven, sixteen and fifty-eight⁠—there certainly was something very attractive about those numbers. + 

Giuoca il sette e il sedici + 

Uniti al cinquantotto. + 

He had a very good mind to do as the oracle commanded. It was a charm, a spell to bind fate: one couldn’t fail to win with those three numbers. He thought of what he would do when he had won. He had just decided on the make of car he would buy⁠—one of the new 14⁠–⁠40 horsepower Lancias would be more elegant, he thought, than a Fiat and less expensive (for he retained his good sense and his habits of economy even in the midst of overflowing wealth) than an Isotta Fraschini or a Nazzaro⁠—when he found himself at the foot of the steps leading up to the palace door. He leaned his bicycle against the wall and, sighing profoundly, rang the bell. This time the butler only gave him two francs instead of three. Such is life, he thought, as he coasted down through the forest of silver olive trees towards the valley. + 

The telegram was addressed to Mrs. Aldwinkle; but in the absence of the lady of the house, who had driven down with all her other guests to the Marina di Vezza for a day’s bathing, the butler brought the telegram to Miss Thriplow. + 

Miss Thriplow was sitting in a dark little Gothic room in the most ancient part of the palace, composing the fourteenth chapter of her new novel on a Corona typewriter. She was wearing a printed cotton frock⁠—huge blue checks ruled, tartan-fashion, on a white ground⁠—very high in the waist, very full and long in the skirt; a frock that was at once old-fashioned and tremendously contemporary, school-girlish and advanced, demure and more than Chelsea-ishly emancipated. The face that she turned towards the butler as he came in was very smooth and round and pale, so smooth and round that one would never have credited her with all the thirty years of her age. The features were small and regular, the eyes dark brown; and their arched brows looked as though they had been painted on to the porcelain mask by an oriental brush. Her hair was nearly black and she wore it drawn sleekly back from her forehead and twined in a large knot at the base of her neck. Her uncovered ears were quite white and very small. It was an inexpressive face, the face of a doll, but of an exceedingly intelligent doll. + 

She took the telegram and opened it. + 

“It’s from Mr. Calamy,” she explained to the butler. “He says he’s coming by the three-twenty and will walk up. I suppose you had better have his room got ready for him.” + 

The butler retired; but instead of going on with her work, Miss Thriplow leaned back in her chair and pensively lighted a cigarette. + 

Miss Thriplow came down at four o’clock, after her siesta, dressed, not in the blue and white frock of the morning, but in her best afternoon frock⁠—the black silk one, with the white piping round the flounces. Her pearls, against this dark background, looked particularly brilliant. There were pearls too in her pale small ears; her hands were heavily ringed. After all that she had heard of Calamy from her hostess she had thought it necessary to make these preparations, and she was glad that his unexpected arrival was to leave her alone with him at their first introduction. Alone, it would be easier for her to make the right, the favourable first impression which is always so important. + 

From what Mrs. Aldwinkle had said about him Miss Thriplow flattered herself that she knew just the sort of man he was. Rich, handsome, and what an amorist! Mrs. Aldwinkle had dwelt, of course, very lengthily and admiringly on that last quality. The smartest hostesses pursued him; he was popular in the best and most brilliant sets. But not a mere social butterfly, Mrs. Aldwinkle had insisted. On the contrary, intelligent, fundamentally serious, interested in the arts and so on. Moreover, he had left London at the height of his success and gone travelling round the world to improve his mind. Yes, Calamy was thoroughly serious. Miss Thriplow had taken all this with a grain of salt; she knew Mrs. Aldwinkle’s weakness for being acquainted with great men and her habit, when the admittedly Great were lacking, of promoting her common acquaintances to the rank of greatness. Deducting the usual seventy-five percent rebate from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s encomiums, she pictured to herself a Calamy who was one of Nature’s Guardsmen, touched, as Guardsmen sometimes are, with that awed and simple reverence for the mysteries of art, which makes these aristocratic autodidacts frequent the drawing-rooms where highbrows are to be found, makes them ask poets out to expensive meals, makes them buy cubist drawings, makes them even try, in secret, to write verses and paint themselves. Yes, yes, Miss Thriplow thought, she perfectly knew the type. That was why she had made these preparations⁠—put on that masterpiece of a fashionable black dress, those pearls, those rings; that was why she had donned, at the same time, the dashing manner of one of those brilliant, equivocal-looking, highborn young women at whose expense, according to Mrs. Aldwinkle, he had scored his greatest amorous triumphs. For Miss Thriplow didn’t want to owe any of her success with this young man⁠—and she liked to be successful with everybody⁠—to the fact that she was a female novelist of good repute. She wanted, since he was one of Nature’s Guardsmen with a fortuitous weakness for artists, to present herself to him as one of Nature’s Guardswomen with a talent for writing equally fortuitous and unessential. She wanted to show him that, after all, she was quite up to all this social business, even though she had been poor once, and a governess at that (and, knowing her, Miss Thriplow was sure that Mrs. Aldwinkle couldn’t have failed to tell him that). She would meet him on level terms, as Guardswoman to Guardsman. Afterwards, when he had liked her for her Guardish qualities, they could get down to art and he could begin to admire her as a stylist as well as a brilliant young woman of his own sort. + 

Her first sight of him confirmed her in her belief that she had been right to put on all her jewellery and her dashing manner. For the butler ushered into the room positively the young man who, on the covers of illustrated magazines, presses his red lips to those of the young woman of his choice. No, that was a little unfair. He was not quite so intolerably handsome and silly as that. He was just one of those awfully nice, well-brought-up, uneducated young creatures who are such a relief, sometimes, after too much highbrow society. Brown, blue-eyed, soldierly and tall. Frightfully upper class and having all the glorious self-confidence that comes of having been born rich and in a secure and privileged position; a little insolent, perhaps, in his consciousness of good looks, in his memory of amorous successes. But lazily insolent; the roasted quails fell into his mouth; it was unnecessary to make an effort. His eyelids drooped in a sleepy arrogance. She knew all about him, at sight; oh, she knew everything. + 

He stood in front of her, looking down into her face, smiling and with eyebrows questioningly raised, entirely unembarrassed. Miss Thriplow stared back at him quite as jauntily. She too could be insolent when she wanted to. + 

“You’re Mr. Calamy,” she informed him at last. + 

He inclined his head. + 

“My name is Mary Thriplow. Everybody else is out. I shall do my best to entertain you.” + 

He bowed again, and took her extended hand. “I’ve heard a great deal about you from Lilian Aldwinkle,” he said. + 

That she’d been a governess? Miss Thriplow wondered. + 

“And from lots of other people,” he went on. “Not to mention your books.” + 

“Ah; but don’t let’s talk of those,” she waved them airily away. “They’re irrelevant, one’s old books⁠—irrelevant because they’re written by someone who has ceased to exist. Let the dead bury their dead. The only book that counts is the one one’s writing at the moment. And by the time that it’s published and other people have begun to read it, that too has become irrelevant. So that there never is a book of one’s own that it’s interesting to talk about.” Miss Thriplow spoke languidly, with a little drawl, smiling as she spoke and looking at Calamy with half-closed eyes. “Let’s talk of something more interesting,” she concluded. + 

“The weather,” he suggested. + 

“Why not?” + 

“Well, it’s a subject,” said Calamy, “about which, as a matter of fact, I can speak at the moment with interest⁠—I might almost say with warmth.” He pulled out a coloured silk handkerchief and wiped his face. “Such an inferno as those dusty roads in the plain I never walked through before. Sometimes, I confess, in this Italian glare I pine for the glooms of London, the parasol of smoke, the haze that takes the edge off a building at a hundred yards and hangs mosquito netting halfway down every vista.” + 

“I remember meeting a Sicilian poet,” said Miss Thriplow, who had invented this successor of Theocritus on the spur of the moment, “who said just the same. Only he preferred Manchester. Bellissima Manchester!” She turned up her eyes and brought her hands together with a clap. “He was a specimen in that glorious menagerie one meets at Lady Trunion’s.” That was a good name to drop casually like that. Lady Trunion’s was one of the salons where Nature’s Guardsmen and Guardswomen encountered the funnies and the fuzzy-wuzzies⁠—in a word, the artists. By using the word “menagerie,” Miss Thriplow put herself, with Calamy, on the Guardsmen’s side of the bars. + 

But the effect of the talismanic name on Calamy was not what she had expected. “And does that frightful woman still continue to function?” he said. “You must remember I’ve been away for a year; I’m not up to date.” + 

Miss Thriplow hastily readjusted the expression of her face, the tone of her voice. Smiling with a knowing contempt, she said: “But she’s nothing to Lady Giblet, is she? For real horrors you must go to her. Why, the house is positively a mauvais lieu.” She moved her jewelled hand from side to side with the gesture of a connoisseur in horror. + 

Calamy did not entirely agree. “Vulgarer, perhaps, at the Giblet’s; but not worse,” he said⁠—and in a tone of voice, with an expression on his face that showed Miss Thriplow that he meant what he said and didn’t at the bottom of his soul secretly adore these social delights. “After having been away, as I have, for a year or so, to come back to civilization and find the same old people doing the same idiotic things⁠—it’s astonishing. One expects everything to be quite different. I don’t know why; perhaps because one’s rather different oneself. But everything is exactly the same. The Giblet, the Trunion and even, let’s be frank, our hostess⁠—though I’m honestly very fond of poor dear Lilian. There’s not the slightest change. Oh, it’s more than astonishing⁠—it’s positively terrifying.” + 

It was at this point in the conversation that Miss Thriplow became aware that she had made a huge mistake, that she was sailing altogether on the wrong tack. Another moment and she would have consummated a hideous error in social judgment, have irreparably made what she called, in her jovial undergraduatish moments, a “floater.” Miss Thriplow was very sensitive about her floaters. Memories of floaters had a way of sticking deep in her spirit, making wounds that never thoroughly healed. Cicatrized, the old scars still hurt from time to time. Suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the night, or even in the middle of the jolliest party, she would remember an ancient floater⁠—just like that, à propos de bottes⁠—would remember and be overcome by a feeling of self-reproach and retrospective shame. And there was no remedy, no spiritual prophylaxis. One might do one’s best to invent triumphantly right and tactful alternatives to the floater⁠—imagine oneself, for example, whispering to sister Fanny the mollifying instead of the bitter, wounding phrase; might walk in fancy with the airiest dignity out of Bardolph’s studio into the dirty little street, past the house with the canary hanging in the window (an exquisite touch the canary), away, away⁠—when in fact (oh Lord, what a fool one had been, and how miserable, afterwards!), in actual fact one had stayed. One could do one’s best; but one could never really persuade oneself that the floater hadn’t happened. Imagination might struggle to annihilate the odious memory; but it never had power to win a decisive victory. + 

And now, if she wasn’t careful, she’d have another floater rankling and suppurating in her memory. “How could I have been so stupid?” she thought, “how could I?” For it was obvious now that the dashing manner, the fashionable disguise were entirely inappropriate to the occasion. Calamy, it was clear, didn’t appreciate that sort of thing at all; he might have once, but he didn’t now. If she went on like this she’d have him putting her down as merely frivolous, worldly, a snob; and it would need time and enormous efforts to obliterate the disastrous first impression. + 

Surreptitiously Miss Thriplow slipped the opal ring from off the little finger of her right hand, held it for a moment, clenched out of sight in her left; then, when Calamy wasn’t looking, pushed it down into the crevice between the padded seat and the back of her chintz-covered armchair. + 

“Terrifying!” she echoed. “Yes, that’s exactly the word. Those things are terrifying. The size of the footmen!” She held up one hand above her head. “The diameter of the strawberries!” She brought both hands (still far too glittering, she regretfully noticed, with their freight of rings) to within a foot of one another in front of her. “The inanity of the lion hunters! The roaring of the lions!” It was unnecessary to do anything with her hands now; she dropped them back into her lap and took the opportunity to rid herself of the scarab and the brilliants. And like the conjuror who makes patter to divert attention from the workings of his trick, she leaned forward and began to talk very rapidly and earnestly. “And seriously,” she went on, putting seriousness into her voice and smoothing the laughter out of her face, so that it was wonderfully round, earnest and ingenuous, “what rot the lions do roar! I suppose it’s awfully innocent of me; but I always imagined that celebrated people must be more interesting than other people. They’re not!” She let herself fall back, rather dramatically, into her chair. In the process, one hand seemed to have got accidentally stuck behind her back. She disengaged it, but not before the scarab and the brilliants had been slipped into the cache. There was nothing left now but the emerald; that could stay. It was very chaste and austere. But she would never be able to take off her pearls without his noticing. Never⁠—even though men are so inconceivably unobservant. Rings were easy enough to get rid of; but a necklace.⁠ ⁠… And they weren’t even real pearls. + 

Calamy, meanwhile, was laughing. “I remember making the same discovery myself,” he said. “It’s rather painful at first. One feels as though one has been somehow swindled and done in. You remember what Beethoven said: ‘that he seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect.’ One has a right to expect celebrated people to live up to their reputations; they ought to be interesting.” + 

Miss Thriplow leaned forward again, nodding her assent with a childlike eagerness. “I know lots of obscure little people,” she said, “who are much more interesting and much more genuine, one somehow feels, than the celebrated ones. It’s genuineness that counts, isn’t it?” + 

Calamy agreed. + 

“I think it’s difficult to be genuine,” Miss Thriplow went on, “if one’s a celebrity or a public figure, or anything of that sort.” She became very confidential indeed. “I get quite frightened when I see my name in the papers and photographers want to take pictures of me and people ask me out to dinner. I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.” How little and obscure she was! How poor and honest, so to speak. Those roaring lions at Lady Trunion’s, those boring lion huntresses⁠ ⁠… they had no hope of passing through the needle’s eye. + 

“I’m delighted to hear you saying all this,” said Calamy. “If only all writers felt as you do!” + 

Miss Thriplow shook her head, modestly declining the implied compliment. “I’m like Jehovah,” she said; “I just am that I am. That’s all. Why should I make believe that I’m somebody else? Though I confess,” she added, with a greatly daring candour, “that I was intimidated by your reputation into pretending that I was more mondaine than I really am. I imagined you as being so tremendously worldly and smart. It’s a great relief to find you’re not.” + 

“Smart?” repeated Calamy, making a grimace. + 

“You sounded so dazzlingly social from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s accounts.” And as she spoke the words she felt herself becoming correspondingly obscurer and littler. + 

Calamy laughed. “Perhaps I was that sort of imbecile once,” he said. “But now⁠—well, I hope all that’s over now.” + 

“I pictured you,” Miss Thriplow went on, straining, in spite of her obscurity, to be brilliant, “I pictured you as one of those people in the Sketch⁠—‘walking in the Park with a friend,’ you know; a friend who would turn out at the least to be a duchess or a distinguished novelist. Can you wonder that I was nervous?” She dropped back into the depths of her chair. Poor little thing! But the pearls, though not marine, were still rather an embarrassment. + 

II + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she returned, found them on the upper terrace, looking at the view. It was almost the hour of sunset. The town of Vezza at their feet was already eclipsed by the shadow of the great bluff which projected, on the further side of the westernmost of the two valleys, into the plain. But, beyond, the plain was still bright. It lay, stretched out beneath them like a map of itself⁠—the roads marked in white, the pinewoods dark green, the streams as threads of silver, ploughland and meadowland in chequers of emerald and brown, the railway a dark brown line ruled along it. And beyond its furthest fringes of pinewoods and sand, darkly, opaquely blue, the sea. Towards this wide picture, framed between the projecting hills, of which the eastern was still rosily flushed with the light, the western profoundly dark, a great flight of steps descended, past a lower terrace, down, between columnar cypresses, to a grand sculptured gateway halfway down the hill. + 

They stood there in silence, leaning their elbows on the balustrade. Ever since she had jettisoned the Guardswoman they had got on, Miss Thriplow thought, most awfully well. She could see that he liked her combination of moral ingenuousness and mental sophistication, of cleverness and genuineness. Why she had ever thought of pretending she was anything but simple and natural she couldn’t now imagine. After all, that was what she really was⁠—or at least what she had determined that she ought to be. + 

From the entrance court on the west flank of the palace came the hoot of a motor horn and the sound of voices. + 

“There they are,” said Miss Thriplow. + 

“I rather wish they weren’t,” he said, and sighing he straightened himself up and turned round, with his back to the view, towards the house. “It’s like heaving a great stone into a calm pool⁠—all this noise, I mean.” + 

Mentally cataloguing herself among the tranquil charms of evening, Miss Thriplow took the remark to be complimentary to herself. “What smashings of crystal one has to put up with,” she said. “Every other moment, if one’s at all sensitive.” + 

Through the huge echoing saloons of the palace the sound of an approaching voice could be heard. “Calamy,” it called, “Calamy!” mounting through the syllables of the name from a low to a much higher note, not, however, through any intervals known to music, but in a succession of uncertain and quite unrelated tones. “Calamy!” It was as vague and tuneless as the call of an articulate wind. There were hurrying footsteps, a rustling of draperies. In the huge pompous doorway at the head of the steps leading down from the house to the terrace appeared the figure of Mrs. Aldwinkle. + 

“There you are!” she called in a rapture. Calamy walked to meet her. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle was one of those large, handsome, old-masterish women who look as though they had been built up from sections of two different people⁠—such broad shoulders they have, so Junonian a form; and growing from between the shoulders such a slender neck, such a small, compact and childish head. They look their best between twenty-eight and, shall we say, five-and-thirty, when the body is in its perfect maturity and the neck, the little head, the unravaged features seem still to belong to a young girl. Their beauty is made the more striking, the more attractive by the curious incongruousness of its components. + 

“At thirty-three,” Mr. Cardan used to say of her, “Lilian Aldwinkle appealed to all the instinctive bigamist in one. She was eighteen in the attics and widow Dido on the floors below. One had the impression of being with two women at the same time. It was most stimulating.” + 

He spoke, alas, in the past tense; for Mrs. Aldwinkle was no longer thirty-three, nor had been these twelve, these fifteen years or more. The Junonian form⁠—that was still stately and as yet not too massive. And from behind, it is true, the head still looked like a child’s head set on those broad shoulders. But the face, which had once been so much the younger member of the partnership, had outstripped the body in the race through time and was old and worn beyond its years. The eyes were the youngest feature. Large, blue and rather prominent, they stared very glitteringly and intently out of the face. But the setting of them was pouchy and crow’s-footed. There were a couple of horizontal wrinkles across the broad forehead. Two deep folds ran down from the corner of the nose, past the mouth, where they were partially interrupted by another system of folds that moved with the movements of the lips, to the lower edge of the jaw, forming a sharp line of demarcation between the sagging cheeks and the strong, prominent chin. The mouth was wide, with lips of rather vague contour, whose indefiniteness was enhanced by Mrs. Aldwinkle’s very careless reddening of them. For Mrs. Aldwinkle was an impressionist; it was the effect at a distance, the grand theatrical flourish that interested her. She had no patience, even at the dressing-table, for niggling pre-Raphaelite detail. + 

She stood there for a moment at the top of the steps, an imposing and majestic figure. Her long and ample dress of pale green linen hung down in stiff fluted folds about her. The green veil tied round her wide straw hat floated airily over her shoulders. She carried a large reticule over one arm and from her waist there dangled at the end of little chains a whole treasury of gold and silver objects. + 

“There you are!” she smiled at the approaching Calamy, smiled what had once been a smile of piercing sweetness, of alluring enchantment. Its interest now, alas, was chiefly historical. With a gesture at once theatrically exaggerated and inexpressive, Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly stretched out both her hands in welcome and ran down the steps to meet him. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s movements were as inharmonious and uncertain as her voice. She moved awkwardly and stiffly. The majesty of her repose was dissipated. + 

“Dear Calamy,” she cried, and embraced him. “I must kiss you,” she said. “It’s such ages since I saw you.” Then turning with a look of suspicion to Miss Thriplow. “How long has he been here?” she asked. + 

“Since before tea,” said Miss Thriplow. + 

“Before tea?” Mrs. Aldwinkle echoed shrilly, as though outraged. “But why didn’t you let me know in time when you were coming?” she went on, turning to Calamy. The thought that he had arrived when she was not there, and that he had, moreover, spent all this time talking with Mary Thriplow, annoyed her. Mrs. Aldwinkle was perpetually haunted by the fear that she was missing something. For a number of years now the universe had always seemed to be conspiring to keep her away from the places where the exciting things were happening and the wonderful words being said. She had been loth enough, this morning, to leave Miss Thriplow behind at the palace; Mrs. Aldwinkle didn’t want her guests to lead independent existences out of her sight. But if she had known, if she had had the slightest suspicion, that Calamy was going to arrive while she was away, that he would spend hours en tête à tête with Mary Thriplow⁠—why then she would never have gone down to the sea at all. She’d have stayed at home, however tempting the prospect of a bathe. + 

“You seem to have made yourself extremely smart for the occasion,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, looking at Miss Thriplow’s pearls and her black silk with the white piping round the flounces. + 

Miss Thriplow looked at the view and pretended not to have heard what her hostess had said. She had no wish to engage in a conversation on this particular subject. + 

“Well now,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle to her new guest, “I must show you the view and the house and all that.” + 

“Miss Thriplow’s already very kindly been doing that,” said Calamy. + 

At this piece of information Mrs. Aldwinkle looked extremely annoyed. “But she can’t have shown you everything,” she said, “because she doesn’t know what there is to show. And besides, Mary knows nothing about the history of the place, or the Cybo Malaspinas, or the artists who worked on the palace, or⁠ ⁠…” she waved her hand with a gesture indicating that, in fine, Mary Thriplow knew nothing whatever and was completely incapable of showing anyone round the house and its gardens. + 

“In any case,” said Calamy, doing his best to say the right thing, “I’ve seen enough already to make me think the place perfectly lovely.” + 

But Mrs. Aldwinkle was not content with this spontaneous and untutored admiration. She was sure that he had not really seen the beauty of the view, that he had not understood it, not known how to analyse it into its component charms. She began to expound the prospect. + 

“The cypresses make such a wonderful contrast with the olives,” she explained, prodding the landscape with the tip of her parasol, as though she were giving a lantern lecture with coloured slides. + 

She understood it all, of course; she was entirely qualified to appreciate it in every detail. For the view was now her property. It was therefore the finest in the world; but at the same time, she alone had the right to let you know the fact. + 

We are all apt to value unduly those things which happen to belong to us. Provincial picture galleries are always stuffed with Raphaels and Giorgiones. The most brilliant metropolis in Christendom, according to its inhabitants, is Dublin. My gramophone and my Ford car are better than yours. And how pathetically boring are those poor but cultured tourists who show us their collection of picture postcards with as much pride as if they had been the original paintings themselves. + 

With the palace Mrs. Aldwinkle had purchased vast domains unmentioned in the contract. She had bought, to begin with, the Cybo Malaspina and their history. This family, whose only claim to fame is to have produced, a little before its extinction, that Prince of Massa Carrara to whom the Old Woman in Candide⁠—when she was young and a Pope’s ravishing daughter⁠—was once engaged to be married, had now become for Mrs. Aldwinkle as splendid as the Gonzaga, the Este, the Medici, or the Visconti. Even the dull Dukes of Modena, the tenants of the palace (except during the brief Napoleonic interlude) between the extinction of the Cybo Malaspina and the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy, even the Dukes of Modena had so far profited by their connection with the place that for Mrs. Aldwinkle they were now patrons of letters and fathers of their people. And Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Bacciochi, who had, while Princess of Lucca, passed more than one hot summer on these heights, had come to be credited by the present owner with an unbounded enthusiasm for the arts and, what in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes was almost more splendid, an unbounded enthusiasm for love. In Elisa Bonaparte-Bacciochi Mrs. Aldwinkle had acquired a sister soul, whom she alone understood. + 

It was the same with the landscape. It was hers down to the remote horizon, and nobody but she could really give it its due. And then, how she appreciated the Italians! Ever since she had bought a house in Italy, she had become the one foreigner who knew them intimately. The whole peninsula and everything it contained were her property and her secret. She had bought its arts, its music, its melodious language, its literature, its wine and cooking, the beauty of its women and the virility of its Fascists. She had acquired Italian passion: cuore, amore and dolore were hers. Nor had she forgotten to buy the climate⁠—the finest in Europe⁠—the fauna⁠—and how proud she was when she read in her morning paper that a wolf had devoured a Pistoiese sportsman within fifteen miles of home!⁠—the flora⁠—especially the red anemones and the wild tulips⁠—the volcanoes⁠—still so wonderfully active⁠—the earthquakes.⁠ ⁠… + 

“And now,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she had polished off the view, “now we must look at the house.” + 

She turned her back on the view. “This part of the palace,” she said, continuing her lecture, “dates from about 1630.” She pointed upwards with her parasol; the coloured slides were now architectural. “A very fine specimen of early baroque. What remains of the old castle, with the tower, constitutes the eastern wing of the present house.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Miss Thriplow, who had heard all this before, listened none the less with the rapt expression of interest that one sees on the faces of children at Royal Institution lectures; partly to atone in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes for the offence of having been at home when Calamy arrived, and partly to impress Calamy himself with her capacity for being frankly, totally and uncritically absorbed in the little affairs of the moment. + 

“Now I’ll show you the inside of the palace,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, mounting the steps that led from the terrace to the house; her treasures jingled at the end of their chains. Obediently Miss Thriplow and Calamy followed in her wake. + 

“Most of the paintings,” proclaimed Mrs. Aldwinkle, “are by Pasquale da Montecatini. A great painter⁠—dreadfully underrated.” She shook her head. + 

Miss Thriplow was somewhat embarrassed when, at this remark, her companion turned to her and made a hardly perceptible grimace. Whether to smile confidentially and ironically back, whether to ignore the grimace and preserve the Royal Institution expression⁠—that was the question. In the end she decided to ignore the tacit confidence. + 

On the threshold of the great saloon they were met by a young girl dressed in a frock of pale pink linen, with a very young round face (otherwise ingenuous than Miss Thriplow’s) looking out of a rectangular window cut in a short smooth bell of copper-coloured hair. A pair of wide-open pale blue eyes looked out from beneath the straight metallic fringe. Her nose was small and delicately snubby. A short upper lip made her look at once pathetic and merry, like a child. It was Mrs. Aldwinkle’s niece, Irene. + 

She shook hands with Calamy. + 

“I suppose,” he said, “that I ought to tell you that you’ve grown up tremendously since I saw you last. But the truth is that I don’t think you have at all.” + 

“I can’t help my appearance,” she answered. “But inside⁠ ⁠…” Inside Irene was older than the rocks on which she sat. It was not for nothing that she had passed the five most impressionable years of her life under her Aunt Lilian’s guardianship. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle impatiently cut short the conversation. “I want you to look at this ceiling,” she said to Calamy. Like hens drinking they stared up at the rape of Europa. Mrs. Aldwinkle lowered her gaze. “And the rustic work with the group of marine deities.” In a pair of large niches, lined with shell-work and sponge-stone, two fishy groups furiously writhed. “So delightfully seicento,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. + 

Irene, meanwhile, feeling herself excused by long familiarity from paying much attention to the marine deities, had noticed that the loose cretonne covers of the armchairs were crumpled. Being naturally tidy⁠—and since she had lived with Aunt Lilian she had had to be tidy for two⁠—she tiptoed across the room to smooth them out. Bending down to the nearest of the chairs, she took hold of the loose cover near the front of the seat and gave it a smart pull down, so as to loosen it completely before she tucked it tidily in again. The stuff came forward like a suddenly bellying sail and with it there was shot out⁠—from nowhere, as though Irene had been doing a conjuring trick⁠—a glittering shower of jewels. They rattled on the floor, they rolled over the tiles. The noise disturbed Miss Thriplow in her rapt and childlike contemplation of the sponge-stone niches. She turned round just in time to see a scarab ring racing towards her, with the limp of an eccentric hoop, across the tiles. Arrived within a few feet of her it lost speed, it staggered, it fell on its side. Miss Thriplow picked it up. + 

“Oh, it’s only my rings,” she said airily, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for her rings to come jumping out of the chair when Irene straightened out the cover. “That’s all,” she added reassuringly to Irene, who was standing, as though petrified by surprise, looking down at the scattered jewels. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle was fortunately absorbed in telling Calamy about Pasquale da Montecatini. + 

III + 

Dinner was served in the Saloon of the Ancestors. In Mrs. Aldwinkle’s enthusiastic imagination what marvellous symposia had been held within those walls⁠—centuries even before they were built⁠—what intellectual feasts! Aquinas, here, had confided to an early Malaspina his secret doubt on the predictability of rollations, had twitted the robber marquess, over a goblet of wine, with the feebleness of his synderesis. Dante had insisted on the advantages of having a Platonic mistress whom one never met and who could, when necessary, be identified with Theology. Peter of Picardy, meanwhile, on his way to Rome had recited from his rhymed version of Physiologus the lines on the Hyaena, a beast which, besides being an hermaphrodite, carries in its eye a stone which, held by a man in his mouth, permits him to see the future; it symbolizes moreover avarice and lasciviousness. Learned Boccaccio had discoursed on the genealogy of the gods. Pico della Mirandola, over the boar’s head, quoted the kabbala in support of the doctrine of the Trinity. Michelangelo had expounded his plans for the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence. Galileo had speculated why it is only up to thirty-two feet that Nature abhors a vacuum. Marini had astonished with his conceits. Luca Giordano, for a wager, had painted, between the roast and the dessert, a full-sized picture of Hannibal crossing the Alps.⁠ ⁠… And then, what brilliant ladies heightened the lustre of these feasts! Lovely, perennially young, accomplished as the protagonists of Castiglione’s Courtier, amorous in the extreme⁠—they inspired the men of genius to yet higher flights, they capped their hardiest sallies with a word of feminine grace. + 

It had been Mrs. Aldwinkle’s ambition, ever since she bought the palace, to revive these ancient glories. She saw herself, unofficially a princess, surrounded by a court of poets, philosophers and artists. Beautiful women should swim through the great saloons and the gardens, glowing with love for the men of genius. And periodically⁠—for the apartment of the dwarfs, which the Cybo Malaspina, in imitation of the Gonzaga, had included in their palace, demanded appropriate inhabitants to furnish it⁠—periodically they should bring forth, painlessly, children to the men of genius⁠—all curly-headed, fully toothed and two years old on the day of birth, and all infant prodigies. Rows of little Mozarts. In a word, the palace of Vezza should re-become what it had never been except in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s fancy. + 

What it had been in fact one could only guess by looking at the faces of the Ancestors who gave the banqueting-hall its name. + 

From circular niches set high in the walls of the huge square room the lords of Massa Carrara looked out, bust after bust, across the intervening centuries. Right round the room they went, beginning on the left of the fireplace and ending, with the penultimate Cybo Malaspina, who arranged the room, on the right. And as marquess succeeded marquess and prince, prince, an expression of ever profounder imbecility made itself apparent on the faces of the Ancestors. The vulture’s nose, the formidable jaw of the first robber marquess transformed themselves by gradual degrees into the vague proboscides of anteaters, into criminally prognathous deformities. The foreheads grew lower with every generation, the marble eyes stared ever blanklier and the look of conscious pride became more and more strongly marked on every countenance. It was the boast of the Cybo Malaspina that they had never married beneath them and that their heirs had always been legitimate. One had only to look at the faces of the last three Princes to feel sure that the boast was amply justified. Were these the Muses’ friends? + 

“You can imagine the splendour of the scene,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle rapturously as she entered the Saloon of the Ancestors on Calamy’s arm. “The innumerable candles, the silks, the jewels. And all the crowd manoeuvring in the most stately manner according to the rules of etiquette.” The last representative, albeit adoptive, of these gorgeous beings, Mrs. Aldwinkle lifted her head still higher and with a still more swelling port sailed across the huge room towards the little table where, in shrunken splendour, the successors of Cybo Malaspina were to dine. The train of her coral-coloured velvet dress rustled after her. + 

“It must have been very fine,” Calamy agreed. “Certainly, from the point of view of picturesqueness, we’ve lost by the passing of etiquette. One wonders how much further informality will go. Mr. Gladstone, in his old age, paid a visit to Oxford and was horrified to observe the new fashions in undergraduates’ dress. In his young days every young man who respected himself had at least one pair of trousers in which he never sat down for fear of making them bag at the knees, while the outfit in which he normally walked about the streets was never worth less than seventy or eighty pounds. And yet, in the time of Mr. Gladstone’s visit, the undergraduates still wore stiff collars and bowler hats. What would he have said if he could have seen them now? And what shall we say fifty years hence?” + 

The company disposed itself round the table. Calamy, as the new arrival, occupied the place of honour on Mrs. Aldwinkle’s right. + 

“You’ve broached a very interesting subject,” said Mr. Cardan, who sat opposite him, on their hostess’s left. “Very interesting,” he repeated, as he unfolded his napkin. Mr. Cardan was a middle-sized, thickly built man. The upper hem of his trousers followed an ample geodesic; his shoulders were very broad, his neck short and powerful. The red face looked tough and knobbly like the head of a cudgel. It was an enigmatic and equivocal face, whose normal expression was at once gross and sensitively refined, serious and sly. The mouth was small and its thin lips fitted tightly together, as though they were the moving parts of a very well made piece of furniture. The line that marked the meeting of the lips was almost straight, but at one end its horizontal gravity was deflected a trifle downwards, so that Mr. Cardan seemed to be forever in process of suppressing a wry smile that was forever importunately troubling his demureness. The hair was smooth, silvery and saintly. The nose was short and straight, like a lion’s⁠—but a lion’s that had become, with time and good living, rather bottled. Looking out from the midst of a web-work of fine wrinkles, the eyes were small, but bright and very blue. As the result, perhaps, of an illness⁠—or perhaps it was merely under the weight of five-and-sixty years⁠—one white eyebrow had settled down permanently lower than the other. From the right side of his face Mr. Cardan looked at you mysteriously and confidentially through the gap in a kind of chronic wink. But from the left the glance was supercilious and aristocratic, as though the western socket had been stretched by an invisible monocle a size or so too large for it. An expression of benevolence mingled with malice shone in his glance while he was talking; and when he laughed, every polished red facet of his cudgel’s face twinkled with mirth, as though suddenly illumined from within. Mr. Cardan was neither a poet nor a philosopher; nor of a remarkably brilliant family; but Mrs. Aldwinkle, who had known him intimately for many years, justified his inclusion among her courtiers on the ground that he was one of the obscure Great: potentially anything he chose to be, but actually, through indolence, unknown. + 

Mr. Cardan took a couple of spoonfuls of soup before proceeding. “A very interesting subject,” he repeated yet again. He had a melodious voice, ripe, round, fruity and powdered, as it were, with a bloom of huskiness⁠—the faint hoarseness of those who have drunk well, eaten well and copiously made love. “Formality, external pomp, etiquette⁠—their practical disappearance from modern life is really a most extraordinary thing, when you come to think of it. Formality and pomp were one of the essential features of ancient government. Tyranny tempered by transformation scenes⁠—that was the formula of all governments in the seventeenth century, particularly in Italy. Provided you treated your people to a procession or some similarly spectacular function once a month or thereabouts, you could do whatever you pleased. It was the papal method par excellence. But it was imitated by every grand seigneur, down to the most piddling little count in the peninsula. Look how all the architecture of the period is conditioned by the need for display. The architect was there to make backgrounds for the incessant amateur theatricals of his employers. Huge vistas of communicating saloons to march down, avenues for processions, vast flights of steps to do the Grand Monarch descent from the skies. No comfort⁠—since comfort is only private⁠—but an immense amount of splendour to impress the spectator from outside. Napoleon was the last ruler to practise it systematically and scientifically on the grand scale. Those reviews, those triumphal entries and exits, those coronations and weddings and christenings, all those carefully prepared stage effects⁠—why, they were half his secret. And now these pomps are no more. Are our rulers so stupid and so regardless of the lessons of history that they neglect these aids to government? Or can it be that tastes have changed, that the public no longer demands these shows and is no longer impressed by them? I put the question to our political friends.” Mr. Cardan leaned forward, and looking past Miss Thriplow, who sat on his left, smiled at the young man who sat beyond her and at the older man occupying the corresponding place on the opposite side of the table, next to Irene Aldwinkle. + 

The young man, who looked even younger than he really was⁠—and at best it was only two or three months since Lord Hovenden had attained his majority⁠—smiled amiably at Mr. Cardan and shook his head, then turned hopefully to the person who sat opposite him. “Ask me anover,” he said. Lord Hovenden still found it difficult to pronounce a th. “What do you say, Mr. Falx?” An expression of respectful attention appeared on his boyish, freckled face as he waited for Mr. Falx’s answer. Whatever the answer might be, it was obvious that Lord Hovenden would regard it as oracular. He admired, he revered Mr. Falx. + 

Mr. Falx, indeed, invited admiration and respect. With his white beard, his long and curly white hair, his large dark liquid eyes, his smooth broad forehead and aquiline nose, he had the air of a minor prophet. Nor were appearances deceptive. In another age, in other surroundings, Mr. Falx would in all probability have been a minor prophet: a denouncer, a mouthpiece of the Lord, a caller to salvation, a threatener of wrath to come. Having been born in the middle of the nineteenth century and having passed the years of his early manhood in the profession which, between three and seven, every male child desires to embrace⁠—that of the engine driver⁠—he had become not exactly a prophet, but a Labour leader. + 

Lord Hovenden, whose claim to figure in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s court was the fact that she had known him since he was a baby, that he was descended from Simon de Montfort, and that he was immensely rich, had added a further merit: he had become an ardent Guild Socialist. An earnest young schoolmaster had first apprised him of the fact⁠—hitherto but very imperfectly realized by Lord Hovenden⁠—that there are a great many poor people whose lives are extremely disagreeable and arduous and who, if justice were done, would be better off than they are at present. His generous impulses were stirred. Youthfully, he desired to precipitate an immediate millennium. Perhaps, too, a certain egotistical ambition to distinguish himself above his fellows had something to do with his enthusiasm. Among persons born in privileged positions and in the midst of wealth, snobbery often takes a form rather different from that which it commonly assumes. Not always, indeed; for there are plenty of rich and titled persons who regard wealth and title with the same abject respect as is shown by those whose acquaintance with the nobility and the plutocracy is only in fiction and the pages of the weekly papers. But others, whose ambition it is to climb out of the familiar surroundings into, at any rate intellectually, higher spheres, become infected with a passionate snobbery in regard to the artistic or political world. This snobbery⁠—the snobbery of blood towards brain⁠—had mingled without his being conscious of it with Lord Hovenden’s purely humanitarian ardour, and had given it added strength. Lord Hovenden’s pleasure at being introduced to Mr. Falx had been enormous, and the thought that he alone, of all his friends and relations, enjoyed the privilege of Mr. Falx’s acquaintance, that he alone was free of the exciting political world in which Mr. Falx lived, had made him more than ever enthusiastic in the cause of justice. There had been occasions, however⁠—and they had become more frequent of late⁠—when Lord Hovenden had found that the demands made on him by a strenuous social life left him very little time for Mr. Falx or Guild Socialism. For one who danced as long and often as he did it was difficult to pay much attention to anything else. In lulls between the merrymaking he remembered with shame that he had not done his duty by his principles. It was to make up for arrears in enthusiasm that he had cut short his grouse shooting to accompany Mr. Falx to an International Labour Conference in Rome. The conference was to be held towards the end of September; but Lord Hovenden had sacrificed a month’s more shooting than was necessary by suggesting that, before the conference, Mr. Falx and he should go to stay for a few weeks with Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Come when you like and bring whom you like.” Those were the words of Lilian’s invitation. He telegraphed to Mrs. Aldwinkle to say that Mr. Falx needed a holiday and that he proposed to bring him; Mrs. Aldwinkle replied that she would be delighted to have him. There they were. + 

Mr. Falx paused for a moment before answering Mr. Cardan’s question. He turned his bright dark eyes round the table, as though collecting everybody’s attention; then spoke in the penetrating musical voice that had stirred so many audiences to enthusiasm. “Twentieth-century rulers,” he said, “respect the educated democracy too much to try to bamboozle it and keep it falsely contented by mere shows. Democracies demand reason.” + 

“Oh, come,” protested Mr. Cardan. “What about Mr. Bryan’s agitation against Evolution?” + 

“Moreover,” Mr. Falx went on, ignoring the point, “we in the twentieth century have outgrown that sort of thing.” + 

“Perhaps we have,” said Mr. Cardan. “Though I can’t imagine how we should have. Opinions change, of course, but the love of a show isn’t an opinion. It’s founded on something deeper, something which has no business to change.” Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It reminds me,” he went on after a little pause, “of another, similarly deep-rooted change that I can never account for: the change in our susceptibility to flattery. It’s impossible to read any ancient moralist without finding copious warnings against flatterers. ‘A flattering mouth worketh ruin’⁠—it’s in the Bible. And the reward of the flatterer is also specified there. ‘He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail’⁠—though one would have thought that the vicariousness of the threatened punishment rendered it a little less formidable. But at any rate, in ancient days the great and the prosperous seem to have been fairly at the mercy of flatterers. And they laid it on so thick, they did their job, from all accounts, so extremely coarsely! Can it be that the educated plutocracy of those days was really taken in by that sort of thing? It wouldn’t be now. The flattery would have to be a great deal more subtle nowadays to produce the same effect. Moreover, I never find in the works of the modern moralists any warnings against flatterers. There’s been some sort of change; though how it has come about, I really don’t quite know.” + 

“Perhaps there has been a moral progress,” suggested Mr. Falx. + 

Lord Hovenden turned his eyes from Mr. Falx’s face, on which, while he was speaking, they had been reverently fixed, and smiled at Mr. Cardan with an air of inquiring triumph that seemed to ask whether he had any answer to make to that. + 

“Perhaps,” repeated Mr. Cardan, rather dubiously. + 

Calamy suggested another reason. “It’s surely due,” he said, “to the change in the position of the great and the prosperous. In the past they regarded themselves and were regarded by others as being what they were by divine right. Consequently, the grossest flattery seemed to them only their due. But now the right to be a prince or a millionaire seems a little less divine than it did. Flattery which once seemed only an expression of proper respect now sounds excessive; and what in the past was felt to be almost sincere is now regarded as ironical.” + 

“I think you may be right,” said Mr. Cardan. “One result, at any rate, of this slump in flattery has been a great alteration in the technique of the parasite.” + 

“Has the technique of the parasite ever altered?” asked Mr. Falx. Lord Hovenden passed on his question to Mr. Cardan in an interrogating smile. “Hasn’t he always been the same⁠—living on the labours of society without contributing to the common stock?” + 

“We are speaking of different sorts of parasites,” Mr. Cardan explained, twinkling genially at the minor prophet. “Your parasites are the idle rich; mine are the idle poor who live on the idle rich. Big fleas have little fleas; I was referring to the tapeworms of tapeworms. A most interesting class, I assure you; and one that has never really had its due from the natural historians of humanity. True, there’s Lucian’s great work on the art of being a parasite, and a very fine work too; but a little out of date, particularly where flattery is concerned. Better than Lucian is Diderot. But the Neveu de Rameau deals with only a single type of parasite, and that not the most successful or the most worthy of imitation. Mr. Skimpole in Bleak House isn’t bad. But he lacks subtlety; he’s not a perfect model for the budding tapeworm. The fact is that no writer, so far as I’m aware, has really gone into the question of parasites. I feel their remissness,” Mr. Cardan added, twinkling first at Mrs. Aldwinkle, then round the table at her guests, “almost as a personal affront. Professing as I do⁠—or perhaps trying to profess would be a more accurate description⁠—the parasitical mystery, I regard this conspiracy of silence as most insulting.” + 

“How absurd you are,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. The complacent references to his own moral defects and weaknesses were frequent in Mr. Cardan’s conversation. To disarm criticism by himself forestalling it, to shock and embarrass those susceptible of embarrassment, to air his own freedom from the common prejudices by lightly owning to defects which others would desire to conceal⁠—it was to achieve these ends that Mr. Cardan so cheerfully gave himself away. “Absurd!” Mrs. Aldwinkle repeated. + 

Mr. Cardan shook his head. “Not at all absurd,” he said. “I’m only telling the truth. For alas, it is true that I’ve never really been a successful parasite. I could have been a pretty effective flatterer; but unfortunately I happen to live in an age when flattery doesn’t work. I might have made a tolerably good buffoon, if I were a little stupider and a little more high-spirited. But even if I could have been a buffoon, I should certainly have thought twice before taking up that branch of parasitism. It’s dangerous being a court fool, it’s most precarious. You may please for a time; but in the end you either bore or offend your patrons. Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau is the greatest literary specimen of the type; you know what a wretched sort of life he led. No, your permanently successful parasite, at any rate in modern times, belongs to an entirely different type⁠—a type, alas, to which by no possible ingenuity could I make myself conform.” + 

“I should hope not,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, standing up for Mr. Cardan’s Better Self. + 

Mr. Cardan bowed his acknowledgments and continued. “All the really successful parasites I have come across recently belong to the same species,” he said. “They’re quiet, they’re gentle, they’re rather pathetic. They appeal to the protective maternal instincts. They generally have some charming talent⁠—never appreciated by the gross world, but recognized by the patron, vastly to his credit of course; (that flattery’s most delicate). They never offend, like the buffoon; they don’t obtrude themselves, but gaze with doglike eyes; they can render themselves, when their presence would be tiresome, practically nonexistent. The protection of them satisfies the love of dominion and the altruistic parental instinct that prompts us to befriend the weak. You could write at length about all this,” went on Mr. Cardan, turning to Miss Thriplow. “You could make a big deep book out of it. I should have done it myself, if I had been an author; and but for the grace of God, I might have been. I give you the suggestion.” + 

In words of one syllable Miss Thriplow thanked him. She had been very mousey all through dinner. After all the risks she had run this afternoon, the floaters she had stood on the brink of, she thought it best to sit quiet and look as simple and genuine as possible. A few slight alterations in her toilet before dinner had made all the difference. She had begun by taking off the pearl necklace and even, in spite of the chastity of its design, the emerald ring. That’s better, she had said to herself as she looked at the obscure little person in the simple black frock⁠—without a jewel, and the hands so white and frail, the face so pale and smooth⁠—who stood opposite her in the looking-glass. “How frankly and innocently she looks at you with those big brown eyes!” She could imagine Calamy saying that to Mr. Cardan; but what Mr. Cardan would answer she couldn’t quite guess; he was such a cynic. Opening a drawer, she had pulled out a black silk shawl⁠—not the Venetian one with the long fringes, but the much less romantic bourgeois, English shawl that had belonged to her mother. She draped it over her shoulders and with her two hands drew it together across her bosom. In the pier glass she seemed almost a nun; or better still, she thought, a little girl in a convent school⁠—one of a hundred black-uniformed couples, with lace-frilled pantalettes coming down over their ankles, walking in a long, long crocodile, graded from five foot eight at the head to four foot nothing at the tail. But if she looped the thing up, hood fashion, over her head, she’d be still more obscure, still poorer and honester⁠—she’d be a factory girl, click-clicking along on her clogs to the cotton mill. But perhaps that would be carrying things a little too far. After all, she wasn’t a Lancashire lass. Awfully cultured, but not spoilt; clever, but simple and genuine. That was what she was. In the end she had come down to dinner with the black shawl drawn very tightly round her shoulders. Very small and mousey. The head girl in the convent school had all the accomplishments; but, for the present, wouldn’t speak unless she were spoken to. Modestly, then, demurely, she thanked him. + 

“Meanwhile,” Mr. Cardan continued, “the sad fact remains that I have never succeeded in persuading anybody to become completely responsible for me. True, I’ve eaten quintals of other people’s food, drunk hectolitres of their liquor”⁠—he raised his glass and looking over the top of it at his hostess, emptied it to her health⁠—“for which I’m exceedingly grateful. But I’ve never contrived to live permanently at their expense. Nor have they, for their part, shown the slightest sign of wanting to take me forever to themselves. Mine’s not the right sort of character, alas. I’m not pathetic. I’ve never struck the ladies as being particularly in need of maternal ministrations. Indeed, if I ever had any success with them⁠—I trust I may say so without fatuity⁠—it was due to my strength rather than to my feebleness. At sixty-six, however⁠ ⁠…” He shook his head sadly. “And yet one doesn’t, by compensation, become any the more pathetic.” + 

Mr. Falx, whose moral ideas were simple and orthodox, shook his head; he didn’t like this sort of thing. Mr. Cardan, moreover, puzzled him. “Well,” he pronounced, “all that I can say is this: when we’ve been in power for a little there won’t be any parasites of Mr. Cardan’s kind for the simple reason that there won’t be any parasites of any kind. They’ll all be doing their bit.” + 

“Luckily,” said Mr. Cardan, helping himself again to the mixed fry, “I shall be dead by that time. I couldn’t face the world after Mr. Falx’s friends have dosed it with Keating’s and vermifuge. Ah, all you young people,” he went on, turning to Miss Thriplow, “what a fearful mistake you made, being born when you were!” + 

“I wouldn’t change,” said Miss Thriplow. + 

“Nor would I,” Calamy agreed. + 

“Nor I,” Mrs. Aldwinkle echoed, ardently associating herself with the party of youth. She felt as young as they did. Younger indeed; for having been young when the world was younger, she had the thoughts and the feelings of a generation that had grown up placidly in sheltered surroundings⁠—or perhaps had not grown up at all. The circumstances which had so violently and unnaturally matured her juniors had left her, stiffened as she already was by time into a definite mould, unchanged. Spiritually, they were older than she. + 

“I don’t see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age,” said Calamy. “The sense that everything’s perfectly provisional and temporary⁠—everything, from social institutions to what we’ve hitherto regarded as the most sacred scientific truths⁠—the feeling that nothing, from the Treaty of Versailles to the rationally explicable universe, is really safe, the intimate conviction that anything may happen, anything may be discovered⁠—another war, the artificial creation of life, the proof of continued existence after death⁠—why, it’s all infinitely exhilarating.” + 

“And the possibility that everything may be destroyed?” questioned Mr. Cardan. + 

“That’s exhilarating too,” Calamy answered, smiling. + 

Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It may be rather tame of me,” he said, “but I confess, I prefer a more quiet life. I persist that you made a mistake in so timing your entry into the world that the period of your youth coincided with the war and your early maturity with this horribly insecure and unprosperous peace. How incomparably better I managed my existence! I made my entry in the late fifties⁠—almost a twin to The Origin of Species.⁠ ⁠… I was brought up in the simple faith of nineteenth-century materialism; a faith untroubled by doubts and as yet unsophisticated by that disquieting scientific modernism which is now turning the staunchest mathematical physicists into mystics. We were all wonderfully optimistic then; believed in progress and the ultimate explicability of everything in terms of physics and chemistry, believed in Mr. Gladstone and our own moral and intellectual superiority over every other age. And no wonder. For we were growing richer and richer every day. The lower classes, whom it was still permissible to call by that delightful name, were still respectful, and the prospect of revolution was still exceedingly remote. True, we were at the same time becoming faintly but uncomfortably aware that these lower classes led a rather disagreeable life, and that perhaps the economic laws were not quite so unalterable by human agency as Mr. Buckle had so comfortingly supposed. And when our dividends came rolling in⁠—I still had dividends at that time,” said Mr. Cardan parenthetically and sighed⁠—“came rolling in as regular as the solstices, we did, it is true, feel almost a twinge of social conscience. But we triumphantly allayed those twinges by subscribing to Settlements in the slums, or building, with a little of our redundant cash, a quite superfluous number of white-tiled lavatories for our workers. Those lavatories were to us what papal indulgences were to the less enlightened contemporaries of Chaucer. With the bill for those lavatories in our waistcoat pocket we could draw our next quarter’s dividends with a conscience perfectly serene. It justified us, too, even in our little frolics. And what frolics we had! Discreetly, of course. For in those days we couldn’t do things quite as openly as you do now. But it was very good fun, all the same. I seem to remember a quite phenomenal number of bachelor dinner parties at which ravishing young creatures used to come popping out of giant pies and dance pas seuls among the crockery on the table.” Mr. Cardan slowly shook his head and was silent in an ecstasy of recollection. + 

“It sounds quite idyl‑lic,” said Miss Thriplow, drawlingly. She had a way of lovingly lingering over any particularly rare or juicy word that might find its way into her sentences. + 

“It was,” Mr. Cardan affirmed. “And the more so, I think, because it was so entirely against the rules of those good old days, and because so much discretion did have to be used. It may be merely that I’m old and that my wits have thickened with my arteries; but it does seem to me that love isn’t quite so exciting now as it used to be in my youth. When skirts touch the ground, the toe of a protruding shoe is an allurement. And there were skirts, in those days, draping everything. There was no frankness, no seen reality; only imagination. We were powder magazines of repression and the smallest hint was a spark. Nowadays, when young women go about in kilts and are as barebacked as wild horses, there’s no excitement. The cards are all on the table, nothing’s left to fancy. All’s aboveboard and consequently boring. Hypocrisy, besides being the tribute vice pays to virtue, is also one of the artifices by which vice renders itself more interesting. And between ourselves,” said Mr. Cardan, taking the whole table into his confidence, “it can’t do without those artifices. There’s a most interesting passage on this subject in Balzac’s Cousine Bette. You remember the story?” + 

“Such a wonderful⁠ ⁠… !” exclaimed Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that large and indistinct enthusiasm evoked in her by every masterpiece of art. + 

“It’s where Baron Hulot falls under the spell of Madame Marneffe: the old beau of the empire and the young woman brought up on the Romantic Revival and early Victorian virtues. Let me see if I can remember it.” Mr. Cardan thoughtfully frowned, was silent for a moment, then proceeded in an almost flawless French. “ ‘Cet homme de l’empire, habitué au genre empire, devait ignorer absolument les façons de l’amour moderne, les nouveaux scrupules, les différentes conversations inventées depuis 1830, et où la “pauvre faible femme” finit par se faire considérer comme la victime des désirs de son amant, comme une sœur de charité qui panse des blessures, comme un ange qui se dévoue. Ce nouvel art d’aimer consomme énormément de paroles évangéliques à l’œuvre du diable. La passion est un martyre. On aspire à l’idéal, à l’infini de part et d’autre; l’on veut devenir meilleur par l’amour. Toutes ces belles phrases sont un prétexte à mettre encore plus d’ardeur dans la pratique, plus de rage dans les chutes (Mr. Cardan rolled out these words with a particular sonority) que par le passé. Cette hypocrisie, le caractère de notre temps a gangrené la galanterie.’ How sharp that is,” said Mr. Cardan, “how wide and how deep! Only I can’t agree with the sentiment expressed in the last sentence. For if, as he says, hypocrisy puts more ardour into the practice of love and more ‘rage in the chutes,’ then it cannot be said to have gangrened gallantry. It has improved it, revivified it, made it interesting. Nineteenth-century hypocrisy was a concomitant of nineteenth-century literary romanticism: an inevitable reaction, like that, against the excessive classicism of the eighteenth century. Classicism in literature is intolerable because there are too many restrictive rules; it is intolerable in love because there are too few. They have this in common, despite their apparent unlikeness, that they are both matter-of-fact and unemotional. It is only by inventing rules about it which can be broken, it is only by investing it with an almost supernatural importance, that love can be made interesting. Angels, philosophers and demons must haunt the alcove; otherwise it is no place for intelligent men and women. No such personages were to be found there in classical times; still less in the neoclassic. The whole process was as straightforward, prosaic, quotidian, and terre à terre as it could be. It must really have become very little more interesting than eating dinner⁠—not that I disparage that, mind you, particularly nowadays; but in my youth”⁠—Mr. Cardan sighed⁠—“I set less stock in those days by good food. Still, even now, I have to admit, there’s not much excitement, not much poetry in eating. It is, I suppose, only in countries where powerful taboos about food prevail that the satisfaction of hunger takes on a romantic aspect. I can imagine that a strictly-brought-up Jew in the time of Samuel might sometimes have been seized by almost irresistible temptations to eat a lobster or some similar animal that divides the hoof but does not chew the cud. I can imagine him pretending to his wife that he was going to the synagogue; but in reality he slinks surreptitiously away down a sinister alley to gorge himself illicitly in some house of ill fame on pork and lobster mayonnaise. Quite a drama there. I give you the notion, gratis, as the subject for a story.” + 

“I’m most grateful,” said Miss Thriplow. + 

“And then, remember, the next morning, after the most portentous dreams all the night through, he’ll wake up tremendously strict, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and he’ll send a subscription to the society for the Protection of Public Morals and another to the Anti-Lobster League. And he’ll write to the papers saying how disgraceful it is that young novelists should be allowed to publish books containing revolting descriptions of ham being eaten in mixed company, of orgies in oyster shops, with other culinary obscenities too horrible to be mentioned. He’ll do all that, won’t he, Miss Mary?” + 

“Most certainly. And you forgot to say,” added Miss Thriplow, forgetting that she was the head girl in the convent school, “that he’ll insist more strictly than ever on his daughters being brought up in perfect ignorance of the very existence of sausages.” + 

“Quite right,” said Mr. Cardan. “All of which was merely meant to show how exciting even eating might become if religion were brought into it, if dinner were made a mystery and the imagination thoroughly stirred every time the gong sounded. Conversely, how tedious love becomes when it is taken as matter-of-factly as eating dinner. It was essential for the men and women of 1830, if they didn’t want to die of pure boredom, to invent the pauvre faible femme, the martyr, the angel, the sister of charity, to talk like the Bible while they were consummating the devil’s work. The sort of love that their predecessors of the eighteenth century and the empire had made was too prosaic a business. They turned to hypocrisy in mere self-preservation. But the present generation, tired of playing at Madame Marneffe, has reverted to the empire notions of Baron Hulot.⁠ ⁠… Emancipation is excellent, no doubt, in its way. But in the end it defeats its own object. People ask for freedom; but what they finally get turns out to be boredom. To those for whom love has become as obvious an affair as eating dinner, for whom there are no blushful mysteries, no reticences, no fancy-fostering concealments, but only plain speaking and the facts of nature⁠—how flat and stale the whole business must become! It needs crinolines to excite the imagination and dragonish duennas to inflame desire to passion. Too much light conversation about the Oedipus complex and anal erotism is taking the edge off love. In a few years, I don’t mind prophesying, you young people will be whispering to one another sublime things about angels, sisters of charity and the infinite. You’ll be sheathed in Jaeger and pining behind bars. And love, in consequence, will seem incomparably more romantic, more alluring than it does in these days of emancipation.” Mr. Cardan spat out the pips of his last grape, pushed the fruit plate away from him, leaned back in his chair and looked about him triumphantly. + 

“How little you understand women,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, shaking her head. “Doesn’t he, Mary?” + 

“Some women, at any rate,” Miss Thriplow agreed. “You seem to forget, Mr. Cardan, that Diana is quite as real a type as Venus.” + 

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “You couldn’t have put it more succinctly.” Eighteen years ago, she and Mr. Cardan had been lovers. Elzevir, the pianist, had succeeded him⁠—a short reign⁠—to be followed by Lord Trunion⁠—or was it Dr. Lecoing?⁠—or both? At the moment Mrs. Aldwinkle had forgotten these facts. And when she did remember, it was not quite in the way that other people⁠—Mr. Cardan, for example⁠—remembered them. It was all wonderfully romantic, now; and she had been Diana all the time. + 

“But I entirely agree with you,” said Mr. Cardan. “I unequivocally admit the existence of Artemis. I could even prove it for you empirically.” + 

“That’s very good of you,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, trying to be sarcastic. + 

“The only figure on Olympus whom I have always regarded as being purely mythical,” Mr. Cardan went on, “as having no foundation in the facts of life, is Athena. A goddess of wisdom⁠—a goddess!” he repeated with emphasis. “Isn’t that a little too thick?” + 

Majestically Mrs. Aldwinkle rose from the table. “Let us go out into the garden,” she said. + 

IV + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle had even bought the stars. + 

“How bright they are!” she exclaimed, as she stepped out at the head of her little troop of guests on to the terrace. “And how they twinkle! How they palpitate! As though they were alive. They’re never like this in England, are they, Calamy?” + 

Calamy agreed. Agreeing, he had found, was a laboursaving device⁠—positively a necessity in this Ideal Home. He always tried to agree with Mrs. Aldwinkle. + 

“And how clearly one sees the Great Bear!” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, speaking almost perpendicularly upwards into the height of heaven. The Bear and Orion were the only constellations she could recognize. “Such a strange and beautiful shape, isn’t it?” It might almost have been designed by the architect of the Malaspina palace. + 

“Very strange,” said Calamy. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle dropped her eyes from the zenith, turned and smiled at him, penetratingly, forgetting that in the profound and moonless darkness her charm would be entirely wasted. + 

Miss Thriplow’s voice spoke softly, with a kind of childish drawl through the darkness. “They might be Italian tenors,” she said, “tremoloing away like that so passionately in the sky. No wonder, with those stars overhead, no wonder life tends to become a bit operatic in this country at times.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle was indignant. “How can you blaspheme like that against the stars?” she said. Then, remembering that she had also bought Italian music, not to mention the habits and customs of the whole Italian people, she went on: “Besides, it’s such a cheap joke about the tenors. After all, this is the only country where bel canto is still⁠ ⁠…” She waved her hand. “And you remember how much Wagner admired what’s-his-name.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Bellini,” prompted the little niece as self-effacingly as possible. She had heard her aunt speak of Wagner’s admiration before. + 

“Bellini,” repeated Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Besides, life isn’t operatic in Italy. It’s genuinely passionate.” + 

Miss Thriplow was, for a moment, rather at a loss for an answer. She had a faculty for making these little jokes; but at the same time she was so very much afraid that people might regard her as merely clever and unfeeling, a hard and glittering young woman. Half a dozen smart repartees were possible, of course; but then she mustn’t forget that she was fundamentally so simple, so Wordsworthian, such a violet by a mossy stone⁠—particularly this evening, in her shawl. + 

However much we should like to do so, however highly, in private, we think of our abilities, we generally feel that it is bad form to boast of our intelligence. But in regard to our qualities of heart we feel no such shame; we talk freely of our kindness, bordering on weakness, of our generosity carried almost to the point of folly (tempering our boasting a little by making out that our qualities are so excessive as to be defects). Miss Thriplow, however, was one of those rare people so obviously and admittedly clever that there could be no objection to her mentioning the fact as often as she liked; people would have called it only justifiable self-esteem. But Miss Thriplow, perversely, did not want to be praised or to praise herself for her intelligence. She was chiefly anxious to make the world appreciative of her heart. When, as on this occasion, she followed her natural bent towards smartness too far, or when, carried away by the desire to make herself agreeable in flashing company, she found herself saying something whose brilliance was not in harmony with the possession of simple and entirely natural emotions, she would recollect herself and hastily try to correct the misapprehension she had created among her hearers. Now, therefore, at the end of a moment’s lightning meditation, she managed to think of a remark which admirably combined, she flattered herself, the most genuine feeling for Nature with an elegantly recondite allusion⁠—this last for the benefit particularly of Mr. Cardan, who as a scholarly gentleman of the old school was a great appreciator and admirer of learning. + 

“Yes, Bellini,” she said rapturously, picking up the reference from the middle of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s last sentence. “What a wonderful gift of melody! Casta diva⁠—do you remember that?” And in a thin voice she sang the first long phrase. “What a lovely line the melody traces out! Like the line of those hills against the sky.” She pointed. + 

On the further side of the valley to westward of the promontory of hill on which the palace stood, projected a longer and higher headland. From the terrace one looked up at its huge impending mass.⁠ ⁠… It was at this that Miss Thriplow now pointed. With her forefinger she followed the scalloped and undulating outline of its silhouette. + 

“Even Nature, in Italy, is like a work of art,” she added. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle was mollified. “That’s very true,” she said; and stepping out, she began the evening’s promenading along the terrace. The train of her velvet robe rustled after her over the dusty flagstones. Mrs. Aldwinkle didn’t mind in the least if it got dirty. It was the general effect that mattered; stains, dust, clinging twigs and millepedes⁠—those were mere details. She treated her clothes, in consequence, with a fine aristocratic carelessness. The little troop followed her. + 

There was no moon; only stars in a dark blue firmament. Black and flat against the sky, the Herculeses and the bowed Atlases, the kilted Dianas and the Venuses who concealed their charms with a two-handed gesture of alluring modesty, stood, like as many petrified dancers, on the piers of the balustrade. The stars looked between them. Below, in the blackness of the plain, burned constellations of yellow lights. Unremittingly, the croaking of frogs came up, thin, remote, but very clear, from invisible waters. + 

“Nights like this,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, halting and addressing herself with intensity to Calamy, “make one understand the passion of the South.” She had an alarming habit, when she spoke to anyone at all intimately or seriously, of approaching her face very close to that of her interlocutor, opening her eyes to their fullest extent and staring for a moment with the fixed penetrating stare of an oculist examining his patient. + 

Like trucks at the tail of a suddenly braked locomotive, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s guests came joltingly to a stop when she stopped. + 

Calamy nodded. “Quite,” he said, “quite.” Even in this faint starlight, he noticed, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes glittered alarmingly as she approached her face to his. + 

“In this horrible bourgeois age”⁠—Mrs. Aldwinkle’s vocabulary (like Mr. Falx’s, though for different reasons) contained no word of bitterer disparagement than “bourgeois”⁠—“it’s only Southern people who still understand or even, I believe, feel passion.” Mrs. Aldwinkle believed in passion, passionately. + 

From behind the glowing red end of his cigar Mr. Cardan began to speak. In the darkness his voice sounded more than ever ripe and fruity. “You’re quite right,” he assured Mrs. Aldwinkle, “quite right. It’s the climate, of course. The warmth has a double effect on the inhabitants, direct and indirect. The direct effect needs no explaining; warmth calls to warmth. It’s obvious. But the indirect is fully as important. In a hot country one doesn’t care to work too hard. One works enough to keep oneself alive (and it’s tolerably easy to keep alive under these stars), and one cultivates long leisures. Now it’s sufficiently obvious that practically the only thing that anybody who is not a philosopher can do in his leisure is to make love. No serious-minded, hardworking man has the time, the spare energy or the inclination to abandon himself to passion. Passion can only flourish among the well-fed unemployed. Consequently, except among women and men of the leisured class, passion in all its luxuriant intricacy hardly exists in the hardworking North. It is only among those whose desires and whose native idleness are fostered by the cherishing Southern heat that it has flourished and continues to flourish, as you rightly point out, my dear Lilian, even in this burgess age.” + 

Mr. Cardan had hardly begun to speak before Mrs. Aldwinkle indignantly moved on again. He outraged all her feelings. + 

Mr. Cardan talking all the way, they passed the silhouettes of modest Venus, of Diana and her attendant dog, of Hercules leaning on his club and Atlas bending under the weight of his globe, of Bacchus lifting to heaven the stump of a broken arm whose hand had once held the wine cup. Arrived at the end of the terrace, they turned and walked back again past the same row of symbols. + 

“It’s easy to talk like that,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when he had finished. “But it doesn’t make any difference to the grandeur of passion, to its purity and beauty and⁠ ⁠…” She faded out breathlessly. + 

“Wasn’t it Bossuet,” asked Irene timidly, but with determination, for she felt that she owed it to Aunt Lilian to intervene; and besides, Aunt Lilian liked her to take part in the conversation, “wasn’t it Bossuet who said that there was something of the Infinite in passion?” + 

“Splendid, Irene,” Mr. Cardan cried encouragingly. + 

Irene blushed in the concealing darkness. “But I think Bossuet’s quite right,” she declared. She could become a lioness, in spite of her blushes, when it was a question of supporting Aunt Lilian. “I think he’s absolutely right,” she confirmed, after a moment of recollection, out of her own experience. She herself had felt most infinitely, more than once⁠—for Irene had run through a surprising number of passions in her time. “I can’t think,” her Aunt Lilian used to say to her, when Irene came in the evenings to brush her hair before she went to bed, “I can’t think how it is that you’re not wildly in love with Peter⁠—or Jacques⁠—or Mario.” (The name might change as Mrs. Aldwinkle and her niece moved in their seasonal wanderings, backwards and forwards across the map of Europe; but, after all, what’s in a name?) “If I were your age I should be quite bowled over by him.” And thinking more seriously now of Peter, or Jacques, or Mario, Irene would discover that Aunt Lilian was quite right; the young man was indeed a very remarkable young man. And for the remainder of their stay at the Continental, the Bristol, the Savoia, she would be in love⁠—passionately. What she had felt on these occasions was decidedly infinite. Bossuet, there was no doubt of it, knew what he was talking about. + 

“Well, if you think he’s right, Irene,” said Mr. Cardan, “why then, there’s nothing for me to do but retire from the argument. I bow before superior authority.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and bowed. + 

Irene felt herself blushing once more. “Now you’re making fun of me,” she said. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle put her arm protectively round the young girl’s shoulders. “I won’t let you tease her, Cardan,” she said. “She’s the only one of you all who has a real feeling for what is noble and fine and grand.” She drew Irene closer to her, pressed her in a sidelong and peripatetic embrace. Happily, devotedly, Irene abandoned herself. Aunt Lilian was wonderful! + 

“Oh, I know,” said Mr. Cardan apologetically, “that I’m nothing but an old capripede.” + 

Meanwhile Lord Hovenden, humming loudly and walking a little apart from the rest of the company, was making it clear, he hoped, to everyone that he was occupied with his own thoughts and had not heard anything that had been said for the last five minutes. What had been said disturbed him none the less. How did Irene know so much about passion, he wondered? Had there been, could there still be⁠ ⁠… other people? Painfully and persistently the question asked itself. With the idea of dissociating himself still more completely from all that had been said, he addressed himself to Mr. Falx. + 

“Tell me, Mr. Falx,” he said in a pensive voice, as though he had been thinking about the subject for some time before he spoke, “what do you think of the Fascist Trades Unions?” + 

Mr. Falx told him. + 

Passion, Calamy was thinking, passion.⁠ ⁠… One could have enough of it, good Lord! He sighed. If one could say: Never again, and be sure of meaning what one said, it would be a great comfort. Still, he reflected, there was something rather perversely attractive about this Thriplow woman. + 

Miss Thriplow meanwhile would have liked to say something showing that she too believed in passion⁠—but in a passion of a rather different brand from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s; in a natural, spontaneous and almost childish kind of passion, not the hothouse growth that flourishes in drawing-rooms. Cardan was right in not thinking very seriously of that. But he could hardly be expected to know much about the simple and dewy loves that she had in mind. Nor Mrs. Aldwinkle, for that matter. She herself understood them perfectly. On second thoughts, however, Miss Thriplow decided that they were too tenuous and delicate⁠—these gossamer passions of hers⁠—to be talked of here, in the midst of unsympathetic listeners. + 

Casually, as she passed, she plucked a leaf from one of the overhanging trees. Absentmindedly she crushed it between her fingers. From the bruised leaf a fragrance mounted to her nostrils. She lifted her hand towards her face, she sniffed, once, again. And suddenly she was back in the barber’s shop at Weltringham, waiting there while her cousin Jim had his hair cut. Mr. Chigwell, the barber, had just finished with the revolving brush. The shaft of the machine was still turning, the elastic driving band went round and round over the wheel, writhing from side to side as it went round, like a dying snake suspended, dangerously, above Jim’s cropped head. + 

“A little brilliantine, Mr. Thriplow? Hair’s rather dry, you know, rather dry, I’m afraid. Or the usual bay rum?” + 

“Bay rum,” said Jim in the gruffest, most grownup voice he could get out of his chest. + 

And Mr. Chigwell would pick up a vaporizer and squirt Jim’s hair with clouds made out of a clear brown liquid. And the air in the shop was filled with a fragrance which was the fragrance of this leaf, this leaf from Apollo’s tree, that she held in her hand. It all happened years ago and Jim was dead. They had loved one another childishly, with that profound and delicate passion of which she could not speak⁠—not here, not now. + 

The others went on talking. Miss Thriplow sniffed at her crushed bay leaf and thought of her girlhood, of the cousin who had died. Darling, darling Jim, she said to herself; darling Jim! Again and again. How much she had loved him, how terribly unhappy she had been when he died. And she still suffered; still, after all these years. Miss Thriplow sighed. She was proud of being able to suffer so much; she encouraged her suffering. This sudden recollection of Jim, when he was a little boy, in the barber’s shop, this vivid remembrance conjured up by the smell of a crushed leaf, was a sign of her exquisite sensibility. Mingled with her grief there was a certain sense of satisfaction. After all, this had happened quite by itself, of its own accord, and spontaneously. She had always told people that she was sensitive, had a deep and quivering heart. This was a proof. Nobody knew how much she suffered, underneath. How could people guess what lay behind her gaiety? “The more sensitive one is,” she used to tell herself, “the more timid and spiritually chaste, the more necessary it is for one to wear a mask.” Her laughter, her little railleries were the mask that hid from the outside world what was in her soul; they were her armour against a probing and wounding curiosity. How could they guess, for example, what Jim had meant to her, what he still meant⁠—after all these years? How could they imagine that there was a little holy of holies in her heart where she still held communion with him? Darling Jim, she said to herself, darling, darling Jim. The tears came into her eyes. With a finger that still smelt of crushed bay leaves she brushed them away. + 

It suddenly occurred to her that this would make a splendid short story. There would be a young man and a young girl walking like this under the stars⁠—the huge Italian stars, tremoloing away like tenors (she would remember to bring that into the description) overhead in the velvet sky. Their conversation edges nearer and nearer to the theme of love. He’s rather a timid young man. (His name, Miss Thriplow decided, would be Belamy.) One of those charming young men who adore at long range, feel that the girl’s too good for them, daren’t hope that she might stoop from her divinity, and all that. He’s afraid of saying definitely that he loves her for fear of being ignominiously rejected. She, of course, likes him most awfully and her name is Edna. Such a delicate, sensitive creature; his gentleness and diffidence are the qualities in him that particularly charm her. + 

The conversation gets nearer and nearer to love; the stars palpitate more and more ecstatically. Edna picks a leaf from the fragrant laurel as she passes. “What must be so wonderful about love,” the young man is just saying (it’s a set speech and he’s been screwing up his courage to get it out for the last half-hour), “about real love, I mean, is the complete understanding, the fusion of spirits, the ceasing to be oneself and the becoming someone else, the⁠ ⁠…” But sniffing at the crushed leaf, she suddenly cries out, uncontrollably (impulsiveness is one of Edna’s charms), “Why, it’s the barber’s shop at Weltringham! Funny little Mr. Chigwell with the squint! And the rubber band still going round and round over the wheel, wriggling like a snake.” But the poor young man, poor Belamy, is most dreadfully upset. If that’s the way she’s going to respond when he talks about love, he may as well be silent. + 

There’s a long pause; then he begins talking about Karl Marx. And of course she somehow can’t explain⁠—it’s a psychological impossibility⁠—that the barber’s shop at Weltringham is a symbol of her childhood and that the smell of the crushed laurel leaf brought back her dead brother⁠—in the story it would be a brother⁠—to her. She simply can’t explain that her apparently heartless interruption was prompted by a sudden anguish of recollection. She longs to, but somehow she can’t bring herself to begin. It’s too difficult and too elusive to be talked about, and when one’s heart is so sensitive, how can one uncover it, how can one probe the wound? And besides, he ought somehow to have guessed, he ought to have loved her enough to understand; she has her pride too. Every second she delays, the explanation becomes more impossible. In a flat, miserable voice he goes on talking about Karl Marx. And suddenly, unrestrainedly, she begins sobbing and laughing at the same time. + 

V + 

The black silhouette that on the terrace had so perfunctorily symbolized Mr. Cardan transformed itself as he entered the lamp-lit saloon into the complete and genial man. His red face twinkled in the light; he was smiling. + 

“I know Lilian,” he was saying. “She’ll sit out there under the stars, feeling romantic and getting colder and colder, for hours. There’s nothing to be done, I assure you. Tomorrow she’ll have rheumatism. We can only resign ourselves and try to bear her sufferings in patience.” He sat down in an armchair in front of the enormous empty hearth. “That’s better,” he said, sighing. Calamy and Miss Thriplow followed his example. + 

“But don’t you think I’d better bring her a shawl?” suggested Miss Thriplow after a pause. + 

“She’d only be annoyed,” Mr. Cardan answered. “If Lilian has said that it’s warm enough to sit out of doors, then it is warm enough. We’ve already proved ourselves fools by wanting to go indoors; if we brought her a shawl, we should become something worse than fools: we should be rude and impertinent, we should be giving her the lie. ‘My dear Lilian,’ we’d be as good as saying, ‘it isn’t warm. And when you say that it is, you’re talking nonsense. So we have brought you your shawl.’ No, no, Miss Mary. You must surely see yourself that it wouldn’t do.” + 

Miss Thriplow nodded. “How diplomatic!” she said. “You’re obviously right. We’re all children compared to you, Mr. Cardan. Only so high,” she added irrelevantly⁠—but it was all in the childish part⁠—reaching down her hand to within a foot or two of the floor. Childishly she smiled at him. + 

“Only so,” said Mr. Cardan ironically; and lifting his right hand to the level of his eyes, he measured between his thumb and forefinger a space of perhaps half an inch. With his winking eye he peeped at her through the gap. “I’ve seen children,” he went on, “compared to whom Miss Mary Thriplow would be⁠ ⁠…” He threw up his hands and let them fall with a clap on to his thighs, leaving the sentence to conclude itself in the pregnant silence. + 

Miss Thriplow resented this denial of her childlike simplicity. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. But circumstances did not permit her to insist on the fact too categorically in Mr. Cardan’s presence. The history of their friendship was a little unfortunate. At their first meeting, Mr. Cardan, summing her up at a glance (wrongly, Miss Thriplow insisted), had taken her into a kind of cynical and diabolic confidence, treating her as though she were a wholly “modern” and unprejudiced young woman, one of those young women who not only do what they like (which is nothing; for the demurest and the most “old-fashioned” can and do act), but who also airily and openly talk of their diversions. Inspired by her desire to please, and carried away by her facility for adapting herself to her spiritual environment, Miss Thriplow had gaily entered into the part assigned to her. How brilliant she had been, how charmingly and wickedly daring! until finally, twinkling benevolently all the time, Mr. Cardan had led the conversation along such strange and such outrageous paths that Miss Thriplow began to fear that she had put herself in a false position. Goodness only knew what mightn’t, with such a man, happen next. By imperceptible degrees Miss Thriplow transformed herself from a salamander, sporting gaily among the flames, into a primrose by the river’s brim. Henceforward, whenever she talked to Mr. Cardan, the serious young female novelist⁠—so cultured and intelligent, but so unspoiled⁠—put in an appearance. For his part, with that tact which distinguished him in all his social negotiations, Mr. Cardan accepted the female novelist without showing the least astonishment at the change. At most, he permitted himself from time to time to look at her through his winking eye and smile significantly. Miss Thriplow on these occasions pretended not to notice. In the circumstances, it was the best thing she could do. + 

“People always seem to imagine,” said Miss Thriplow with a martyr’s sigh, “that being educated means being sophisticated. And what’s more, they never seem to be able to give one credit for having a good heart as well as a good head.” + 

And she had such a good heart. Anyone can be clever, she used to say. But what matters is being kind and good, and having nice feelings. She felt more than ever pleased about that bay-leaf incident. That was having nice feelings. + 

“They always seem entirely to misunderstand what one writes,” Miss Thriplow went on. “They like my books because they’re smart and unexpected and rather paradoxical and cynical and elegantly brutal. They don’t see how serious it all is. They don’t see the tragedy and the tenderness underneath. You see,” she explained, “I’m trying to do something new⁠—a chemical compound of all the categories. Lightness and tragedy and loveliness and wit and fantasy and realism and irony and sentiment all combined. People seem to find it merely amusing, that’s all.” She threw out her hands despairingly. + 

“It’s only to be expected,” said Mr. Cardan comfortingly. “Anyone who has anything to say can’t fail to be misunderstood. The public only understands the things with which it is perfectly familiar. Something new makes it lose its orientation. And then think of the misunderstandings between even intelligent people, people who know one another personally. Have you ever corresponded with a distant lover?” Miss Thriplow slightly nodded; she was familiar, professionally, with every painful experience. “Then you must know how easy it is for your correspondent to take the expression of one of your passing moods⁠—forgotten long before the arrival of the letter at its destination⁠—as your permanent spiritual condition. Haven’t you been shocked to receive, by the returning post, a letter rejoicing with you in your gaiety, when in fact, at the moment, you are plunged in gloom; or astonished, when you come whistling down to breakfast, to find beside your plate sixteen pages of sympathy and consolation? And have you ever had the misfortune to be loved by somebody you do not love? Then you know very well how expressions of affection which must have been written with tears in the eyes and from the depth of the heart seem to you not merely silly and irritating, but in the worst possible bad taste. Positively vulgar, like those deplorable letters that are read in the divorce courts. And yet these are precisely the expressions that you habitually use when writing to the person you yourself are in love with. In the same way, the reader of a book who happens to be out of tune with the author’s prevailing mood will be bored to death by the things that were written with the greatest enthusiasm. Or else, like the faraway correspondent, he may seize on something which for you was not essential, to make of it the core and kernel of the whole book. And then, you admitted it yourself, you make it very hard for your readers. You write sentimental tragedies in terms of satire and they see only the satire. Isn’t it to be expected?” + 

“There’s something in that, of course,” said Miss Thriplow. But not everything, she added to herself. + 

“And then you must remember,” Mr. Cardan went on, “that most readers don’t really read. When you reflect that the pages which cost a week of unremitting and agonizing labour to write are casually read through⁠—or, more likely, skipped through⁠—in a few minutes, you cannot be surprised if little misunderstandings between author and reader should happen from time to time. We all read too much nowadays to be able to read properly. We read with the eyes alone, not with the imagination; we don’t take the trouble to reconvert the printed word into a living image. And we do this, I may say, in sheer self-defence. For though we read an enormous number of words, nine hundred and ninety out of every thousand of them are not worth reading properly, are not even susceptible of being read except superficially, with the eye alone. Our perfunctory reading of nonsense habituates us to be careless and remiss with all our reading, even of good books. You may take endless pains with your writing, my dear Miss Mary; but out of every hundred of your readers, how many, do you suppose, ever take the pains to read what you write⁠—and when I say read,” Mr. Cardan added, “I mean really read⁠—how many, I repeat?” + 

“Who knows?” said Miss Thriplow. But even if they did read properly, she was thinking, would they really unearth that Heart? That was the vital question. + 

“It’s this mania for keeping up to date,” said Mr. Cardan, “that has killed the art of reading. Most of the people I know read three or four daily newspapers, look at half a dozen weeklies between Saturday and Monday, and a dozen reviews at the end of every month. And the rest of the time, as the Bible with justifiable vigour would put it, the rest of the time they are whoring after new fiction, new plays and verses and biographies. They’ve no time to do anything but skim along uncomprehendingly. If you must complicate the matter by writing tragedy in terms of farce you can only expect confusion. Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver’s Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children’s book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That’s what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story. The publications of the Purity League figure invariably under the heading ‘Curious’ in the booksellers’ catalogues. The theological and, to Milton himself, the fundamental and essential part of Paradise Lost is now so ludicrous that we ignore it altogether. When somebody speaks of Milton, what do we call to mind? A great religious poet? No. Milton means for us a collection of isolated passages, full of bright light, colour and thunderous harmony, hanging like musical stars in the lap of nothing. Sometimes the adult masterpieces of one generation become the reading of schoolboys in the next. Does anyone over sixteen now read the poems of Sir Walter Scott? or his novels, for that matter? How many books of piety and morality survive only for their fine writing! and how our interest in the merely aesthetic qualities of these books would have scandalized their authors! No, at the end of the account it is the readers who make the book what it ultimately is. The writer proposes, the readers dispose. It’s inevitable, Miss Mary. You must reconcile yourself to fate.” + 

“I suppose I must,” said Miss Thriplow. + 

Calamy broke silence for the first time since they had entered the room. “But I don’t know why you complain of being misunderstood,” he said, smiling. “I should have thought that it was much more disagreeable to be understood. One can get annoyed with imbeciles for failing to understand what seems obvious to oneself; one’s vanity may be hurt by their interpretation of you⁠—they make you out to be as vulgar as themselves. Or you may feel that you have failed as an artist, in so far as you haven’t managed to make yourself transparently plain. But what are all these compared to the horrors of being understood⁠—completely understood? You’ve given yourself away, you’re known, you’re at the mercy of the creatures into whose keeping you have committed your soul⁠—why, the thought’s terrifying. If I were you,” he went on, “I’d congratulate myself. You have a public which likes your books, but for the wrong reasons. And meanwhile you’re safe, you’re out of their reach, you possess yourself intact.” + 

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Miss Thriplow. Mr. Cardan understood her, she reflected, or at least understood part of her⁠—an unreal, superficial part, it was true; but still, she had to admit, a part. And it certainly wasn’t agreeable. + 

VI + 

To be torn between divided allegiances is the painful fate of almost every human being. Pull devil, pull baker; pull flesh, pull spirit; pull love, pull duty; pull reason and pull hallowed prejudice. The conflict, in its various forms, is the theme of every drama. For though we have learnt to feel disgust at the spectacle of a bullfight, an execution or a gladiatorial show, we still look on with pleasure at the contortions of those who suffer spiritual anguish. At some distant future date, when society is organized in a rational manner so that every individual occupies the position and does the work for which his capacities really fit him, when education has ceased to instil into the minds of the young fantastic prejudices instead of truths, when the endocrine glands have been taught to function in perfect harmony and diseases have been suppressed, all our literature of conflict and unhappiness will seem strangely incomprehensible; and our taste for the spectacle of mental torture will be regarded as an obscene perversion of which decent men should feel ashamed. Joy will take the place of suffering as the principal theme of art; in the process, it may be, art will cease to exist. A happy people, we now say, has no history; and we might add that happy individuals have no literature. The novelist dismisses in a paragraph his hero’s twenty years of happiness; over a week of misery and spiritual debate he will linger through twenty chapters. When there is no more misery, he will have nothing to write about. Perhaps it will be all for the best. + 

The conflict which had raged during the last few months within Irene’s spirit, though not so serious as some of the inward battles that have distracted strong men in their search for the salvation of integrity, was still for her a painful one. Put baldly in its most concrete form, the question at issue was this: should she paint pictures and write? or should she make her own underclothing? + 

But for Aunt Lilian the conflict would never have become serious; indeed, it would never, in all probability, have begun at all. For if it had not been for Aunt Lilian, the Natural Woman in Irene would have remained undisputed mistress of the field, and she would have passed her days in a placid contentment over the lacy intricacies of her undergarments. Aunt Lilian, however, was on the side of the Unnatural Woman; it was she who had practically called the writer and the painter of pictures into existence, had invented Irene’s higher talents and ranged them against the homelier. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle’s enthusiasm for the arts was such that she wanted everyone to practise one or other of them. It was her own greatest regret that she herself had no aptitude for any of them. Nature had endowed her with no power of self-expression; even in ordinary conversation she found it difficult to give utterance to what she wanted to say. Her letters were made up of the fragments of sentences; it was as though her thoughts had been blown to ungrammatical pieces by a bomb and scattered themselves on the page. A curious clumsiness of hand united with her native impatience to prevent her from drawing correctly or even doing plain sewing. And though she listened to music with an expression of rapture, she had an ear that could not distinguish a major from a minor third. “I’m one of those unfortunate people,” she used to say, “who have an artistic temperament without an artist’s powers.” She had to content herself with cultivating her own temperament and developing other people’s capacities. She never met a young person of either sex without encouraging him or her to become a painter, a novelist, a poet or a musician. It was she who had persuaded Irene that her little dexterity with camel’s-hair brushes was a talent and that she ought on the strength of her amusing letters to write lyrics. “How can you spend your time so stupidly and frivolously?” she used to ask, whenever she found Irene busy at her underlinen. And Irene, who adored her Aunt Lilian with the doglike devotion that is only possible when one is eighteen, and rather young for one’s age at that, put her sewing away and devoted all her energy to portraying in watercolours and describing in rhyme the landscape and the flowers of the garden. But the underclothing remained, none the less, a permanent temptation. She found herself wondering whether her chain-stitch wasn’t better than her painting, her buttonholing superior to her verse. She asked herself whether nightdresses weren’t more useful than watercolours. More useful⁠—and besides she was so awfully particular about what she wore next her skin; and she adored pretty things. So did Aunt Lilian, who used to laugh at her when she wore ugly, dowdy ones. At the same time Aunt Lilian didn’t give her much of an allowance. For thirty shillings Irene could make a garment that it would have cost her five or six guineas to buy in a shop.⁠ ⁠… + 

Underclothing became for Irene the flesh, became illicit love and rebellious reason; poetry and watercolour painting, invested by her adoration of Aunt Lilian with a quality of sacredness, became spirit, duty and religion. The struggle between her inclination and what Aunt Lilian considered good was prolonged and distressing. + 

On nights like this, however, the Natural Woman faded completely out. Under the stars, in the solemn darkness, how could one think of underclothing? And Aunt Lilian was being so affectionate. Still, it certainly was rather cool. + 

“Art’s the great thing,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying earnestly, “the thing that really makes life worth living and justifies one’s existence.” When Mr. Cardan was away she let herself go more confidently on her favourite themes. + 

And Irene, sitting at her feet, leaning against her knee, couldn’t help agreeing. Mrs. Aldwinkle stroked the girl’s soft hair, or with combing fingers disordered its sleek surface. Irene shut her eyes; happily, drowsily, she listened. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s talk came to her in gusts⁠—here a phrase, there a phrase. + 

“Disinterested,” she was saying, “disinterested⁠ ⁠…” Mrs. Aldwinkle had a way, when she wanted to insist on an idea, of repeating the same word several times. “Disinterested⁠ ⁠…” It saved her the trouble of looking for phrases which she could never find, of making explanations which always turned out, at the best, rather incoherent. “Joy in the work for its own sake.⁠ ⁠… Flaubert spent days over a single sentence.⁠ ⁠… Wonderful.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Wonderful!” Irene echoed. + 

A little breeze stirred among the bay trees. Their stiff leaves rattled dryly together, like scales of metal. Irene shivered a little; it was downright cold. + 

“It’s the only really creative⁠ ⁠…” Mrs. Aldwinkle couldn’t think of the word “activity” and had to content herself with making a gesture with her free hand. “Through art man comes nearest to being a god⁠ ⁠… a god.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The night wind rattled more loudly among the bay leaves. Irene crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself to keep warm. Unfortunately, this boa of flesh and blood was itself sensitive. Her frock was sleeveless. The warmth of her bare arms drifted off along the wind; the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere rose by a hundred-billionth of a degree. + 

“It’s the highest life,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “It’s the only life.” + 

Tenderly she rumpled Irene’s hair. And at this very moment, Mr. Falx was meditating, at this very moment, on tramcars in the Argentine, among Peruvian guano-beds, in humming power-stations at the foot of African waterfalls, in Australian refrigerators packed with slaughtered mutton, in the heat and darkness of Yorkshire coal-mines, in tea-plantations on the slopes of the Himalaya, in Japanese banks, at the mouth of Mexican oil-wells, in steamers walloping along across the China Sea⁠—at this very moment, men and women of every race and colour were doing their bit to supply Mrs. Aldwinkle with her income. On the two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s capital the sun never set. People worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only, they⁠—albeit unconscious of the privilege⁠—for art in her. + 

Young Lord Hovenden sighed. If only it were he whose fingers were playing in the smooth thick tresses of Irene’s hair! It seemed an awful waste that she should be so fond of her Aunt Lilian. Somehow, the more he liked Irene the less he liked Aunt Lilian. + 

“Haven’t you sometimes longed to be an artist yourself, Hovenden?” Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly asked. She leaned forward, her eyes glittering with the reflected light of two or three hundred million remote suns. She was going to suggest that he might try his hand at poetical rhapsodies about political injustice and the condition of the lower classes. Something halfway between Shelley and Walt Whitman. + 

“Me!” said Hovenden in astonishment. Then he laughed aloud: Ha, ha, ha! It was a jarring note. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle drew back, pained. “I don’t know why you should think the idea so impossibly comic,” she said. + 

“Perhaps he has other work to do,” said Mr. Falx out of the darkness. “More important work.” And at the sound of that thrilling, deep, prophetical voice Lord Hovenden felt that, indeed, he had. + 

“More important?” queried Mrs. Aldwinkle. “But can anything be more important? When one thinks of Flaubert⁠ ⁠…” One thought of Flaubert⁠—working through all a fifty-four hour week at a relative clause. But Mrs. Aldwinkle was too enthusiastic to be able to say what followed when one had thought of Flaubert. + 

“Think of coal-miners for a change,” said Mr. Falx in answer. “That’s what I suggest.” + 

“Yes,” Lord Hovenden agreed, gravely nodding. A lot of his money came from coal. He felt particularly responsible for miners when he had time to think of them. + 

“Think,” said Mr. Falx in his deep voice; and he relapsed into a silence more eloquently prophetical than any speech. + 

For a long time nobody spoke. The wind came draughtily and in ever chillier gusts. Irene clasped her arms still tightlier over her breast; she shivered, she yawned with cold. Mrs. Aldwinkle felt the shaking of the young body that leaned against her knees. She herself was cold too; but after what she had said to Cardan and the others it was impossible for her to go indoors yet awhile. She felt, in consequence, annoyed with Irene for shivering. “Do stop,” she said crossly. “It’s only a stupid habit. Like a little dog that shivers even in front of the fire.” + 

“All ve same,” said Lord Hovenden, coming to Irene’s defence, “it is getting raver cold.” + 

“Well, if you find it so,” retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle, with overwhelming sarcasm, “you’d better go in and ask them to light a fire.” + 

It was nearly midnight before Mrs. Aldwinkle finally gave the word to go indoors. + 

VII + 

To say good night definitely and for the last time was a thing which Mrs. Aldwinkle found most horribly difficult. With those two fatal words she pronounced sentence of death on yet another day (on yet another, and the days were so few now, so agonizingly brief); she pronounced it also, temporarily at least, on herself. For, the formula once finally uttered, there was nothing for her to do but creep away out of the light and bury herself in the black unconsciousness of sleep. Six hours, eight hours would be stolen from her and never given back. And what marvellous things might not be happening while she was lying dead between the sheets! Extraordinary happinesses might present themselves and, finding her asleep and deaf to their calling, pass on. Or someone, perhaps, would be saying the one supremely important, revealing, apocalyptic thing that she had been waiting all her life to hear. “There!” she could imagine somebody winding up, “that’s the secret of the Universe. What a pity poor Lilian should have gone to bed. She would have loved to hear it.” Good night⁠—it was like parting with a shy lover who had not yet ventured to declare himself. A minute more and he would speak, would reveal himself the unique soul-mate. Good night, and he would remain forever merely diffident little Mr. Jones. Must she part with this day too, before it was transfigured? + 

Good night. Every evening she put off the saying of it as long as she possibly could. It was generally half-past one or two before she could bring herself to leave the drawing-room. And even then the words were not finally spoken. For on the threshold of her bedchamber she would halt, desperately renewing the conversation with whichever of her guests had happened to light her upstairs. Who knew? Perhaps in these last five minutes, in the intimacy, in the nocturnal silence, the important thing really would be said. The five minutes often lengthened themselves out to forty, and still Mrs. Aldwinkle stood there, desperately putting off and putting off the moment when she would have to pronounce the sentence of death. + 

When there was nobody else to talk to, she had to be content with the company of Irene, who always, when she herself had undressed, came back in her dressing-gown to help Mrs. Aldwinkle⁠—since it would have been unfair to keep a maid up to such late hours⁠—make ready for the night. Not that little Irene was particularly likely to utter the significant word or think the one apocalyptic thought. Though of course one never knew: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings⁠ ⁠… And in any case, talking with Irene, who was a dear child and so devoted, was better than definitely condemning oneself to bed. + 

Tonight, it was one o’clock before Mrs. Aldwinkle made a move towards the door. Miss Thriplow and Mr. Falx, protesting that they too were sleepy, accompanied her. And like an attendant shadow, Irene silently rose when her aunt rose and silently walked after her. Halfway across the room Mrs. Aldwinkle halted and turned round. Formidable she was, a tragedy queen in coral-red velvet. Her little white muslin mirage halted too. Less patient, Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow moved on towards the door. + 

“You must all come to bed soon, you know,” she said, addressing herself to the three men who remained at the further end of the room in a tone at once imperious and cajoling. “I simply won’t allow you, Cardan, to keep those poor young men out of their beds to all hours of the night. Poor Calamy has been travelling all day. And Hovenden needs all the sleep, at his age, that he can get.” Mrs. Aldwinkle took it hardly that any of her guests should be awake and talking while she was lying dead in the tomb of sleep. “Poor Calamy!” she pathetically exclaimed, as though it were a case of cruelty to animals. She felt herself filled, all at once, with an enormous and maternal solicitude for this young man. + 

“Yes, poor Calamy!” Mr. Cardan repeated, twinkling. “Out of pure sympathy I was suggesting that we should drink a pint or two of red wine before going to bed. There’s nothing like it for making one sleep.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle turned her bright blue eyes on Calamy, smiled her sweetest and most piercing smile. “Do come,” she said. “Do.” She extended her hand in a clumsy and inexpressive gesture. “And you, Hovenden,” she added, almost despairingly. + 

Hovenden looked uncomfortably from Mr. Cardan to Calamy, hoping that one or other of them would answer for him. + 

“We shan’t be long,” said Calamy. “The time to drink a glass of wine, that’s all. I’m not a bit tired, you know. And Cardan’s suggestion of Chianti is very tempting.” + 

“Ah well,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, “if you prefer a glass of wine⁠ ⁠…” She turned away with a sad indignation and rustled off towards the door, sweeping the tiled floor with the train of her velvet dress. Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow, who had been lingering impatiently near the door, drew back in order that she might make her exit in full majesty. With a face that looked very gravely out of the little window in her bell of copper hair, Irene followed. The door closed behind them. + 

Calamy turned to Mr. Cardan. “If I prefer a glass of wine?” he repeated on a note of interrogation. “But prefer it to what? She made it sound as if I had had to make a momentous and eternal choice between her and a pint of Chianti⁠—and had chosen the Chianti. It passes my understanding.” + 

“Ah, but then you don’t know Lilian as well as I do,” said Mr. Cardan. “And now, let’s go and hunt out that flask and some glasses in the dining-room.” + 

Halfway up the stairs⁠—they were a grand and solemn flight loping gradually upwards under a slanting tunnel of barrel vaulting⁠—Mrs. Aldwinkle paused. “I always think of them,” she said ecstatically, “going up, coming down. Such a spectacle!” + 

“Who?” asked Mr. Falx. + 

“Those grand old people.” + 

“Oh, the tyrants.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled pityingly. “And the poets, the scholars, the philosophers, the painters, the musicians, the beautiful women. You forget those, Mr. Falx.” She raised her hand, as though summoning their spirits from the abyss. Psychical eyes might have seen a jewelled prince with a nose like an anteater’s slowly descending between obsequious human hedges. Behind him a company of buffoons and little hunchbacked dwarfs, stepping cautiously, sidelong, from stair to stair.⁠ ⁠… + 

“I forget nothing,” said Mr. Falx. “But I think tyrants are too high a price to pay.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle sighed and resumed her climbing. “What a queer fellow Calamy is, don’t you think?” she said, addressing herself to Miss Thriplow. Mrs. Aldwinkle, who liked discussing other people’s characters and who prided herself on her perspicacity and her psychological intuition, found almost everybody “queer,” even, when she thought it worth while discussing her, little Irene. She liked to think that everyone she knew was tremendously complicated; had strange and improbable motives for his simplest actions, was moved by huge, dark passions; cultivated secret vices; in a word, was larger than life and a good deal more interesting. “What did you think of him, Mary?” + 

“Very intelligent,” thought Miss Thriplow. + 

“Oh, of course, of course,” Mrs. Aldwinkle agreed almost impatiently; that wasn’t anything much to talk about. “But one hears odd stories of his amorous tastes, you know.” The party halted at the door of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s room. “Perhaps that was one of the reasons,” she went on mysteriously, “why he went travelling all that time⁠—right away from civilization.⁠ ⁠…” On such a theme a conversation might surely be almost indefinitely protracted; the moment for uttering the final, fatal good night had not yet come. + 

Downstairs in the great saloon the three men were sitting over their red wine. Mr. Cardan had already twice refilled his glass. Calamy was within sight of the bottom of his first tumbler; young Lord Hovenden’s was still more than half full. He was not a very accomplished drinker and was afraid of being sick if he swallowed too much of this young and generous brew. + 

“Bored, you’re just bored. That’s all it is,” Mr. Cardan was saying. He looked at Calamy over the top of his glass and took another sip, as though to his health. “You haven’t met anyone of late who took your fancy; that’s all. Unless, of course, it’s a case of catarrh in the bile ducts.” + 

“It’s neither,” said Calamy, smiling. + 

“Or perhaps it’s the first great climacteric. You don’t happen to be thirty-five, I suppose? Five times seven⁠—a most formidable age. Though not quite so serious as sixty-three. That’s the grand climacteric.” Mr. Cardan shook his head. “Thank the Lord, I got past it without dying, or joining the Church of Rome, or getting married. Thank the Lord; but you?” + 

“I’m thirty-three,” said Calamy. + 

“A most harmless time of life. Then it’s just boredom. You’ll meet some little ravishment and all the zest will return.” + 

Young Lord Hovenden laughed in a very ventriloquial, man-of-the-worldly fashion. + 

Calamy shook his head. “But I don’t really want it to return,” he said. “I don’t want to succumb to any more little ravishments. It’s too stupid; it’s too childish. I used to think that there was something rather admirable and enviable about being an homme à bonnes fortunes. Don Juan has an honoured place in literature; it’s thought only natural that a Casanova should complacently boast of his successes. I accepted the current view, and when I was lucky in love⁠—and I’ve always been only too deplorably fortunate⁠—I used to think the more highly of myself.” + 

“We have all thought the same,” said Mr. Cardan. “The weakness is a pardonable one.” + 

Lord Hovenden nodded and took a sip of wine to show that he entirely agreed with the last speaker. + 

“Pardonable, no doubt,” said Calamy. “But when one comes to think it over, not very reasonable. For, after all, there’s nothing really to be very proud of, there’s nothing very much to boast about. Consider first of all the other heroes who have had the same sort of successes⁠—more notable, very probably, and more numerous than one’s own. Consider them. What do you see? Rows of insolent grooms and pugilists; leather-faced ruffians and disgusting old satyrs; louts with curly hair and no brains, and cunning little pimps like weasels; soft-palmed young epicenes and hairy gladiators⁠—a vast army composed of the most odious specimens of humanity. Is one to be proud of belonging to their numbers?” + 

“Why not?” asked Mr. Cardan. “One should always thank God for whatever native talents one possesses. If your talent happens to lie in the direction of higher mathematics, praise God; and if in the direction of seduction, praise God just the same. And thanking God, when one comes to examine the process a little closely, is very much the same as boasting or being proud. I see no harm in boasting a little of one’s Casanovesque capacities. You young men are always so damned intolerant. You won’t allow anyone to go to heaven, or hell, or nowhere, whichever the case may be, by any road except the one you happen to approve of.⁠ ⁠… You should take a leaf out of the Indians’ book. The Indians calculate that there are eighty-four thousand different types of human beings, each with its own way of getting through life. They probably underestimate.” + 

Calamy laughed. “I only speak for my type,” he said. + 

“And Hovenden and I for ours,” said Mr. Cardan. “Don’t we, Hovenden?” + 

“Oh yes. Yes, of course,” Lord Hovenden answered; and for some reason he blushed. + 

“Proceed,” said Mr. Cardan, refilling his glass. + 

“Well then,” Calamy went on, “belonging to the species I do belong to, I can’t take much satisfaction in these successes. The more so when I consider their nature. For either you’re in love with the woman or you aren’t; either you’re carried away by your inflamed imagination (for, after all, the person you’re really violently in love with is always your own invention and the wildest of fancies) or by your senses and your intellectual curiosity. If you aren’t in love, it’s a mere experiment in applied physiology, with a few psychological investigations thrown in to make it a little more interesting. But if you are, it means that you become enslaved, involved, dependent on another human being in a way that’s positively disgraceful, and the more disgraceful the more there is in you to be enslaved and involved.” + 

“It wasn’t Browning’s opinion,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“The woman yonder, there’s no use in life + 

But just to obtain her.” + 

“Browning was a fool,” said Calamy. + 

But Lord Hovenden was silently of opinion that Browning was quite right. He thought of Irene’s face, looking out of the little window in the copper bell. + 

“Browning belonged to another species,” Mr. Cardan corrected. + 

“A foolish species, I insist,” said Calamy. + 

“Well, to tell the truth,” Mr. Cardan admitted, closing his winking eye a little further, “I secretly agree with you about that. I’m not really as entirely tolerant as I should like to be.” + 

Calamy was frowning pensively over his own affairs, and without discussing the greater or less degree of Mr. Cardan’s tolerance he went on. “The question is, at the end of it all: what’s the way out? what’s to be done about it? For it’s obvious, as you say, that the little ravishments will turn up again. And appetite grows with fasting. And philosophy, which knows very well how to deal with past and future temptations, always seems to break down before the present, the immediate ones.” + 

“Happily,” said Mr. Cardan. “For, when all is said, is there a better indoor sport? Be frank with me; is there?” + 

“Possibly not,” said Calamy, while young Lord Hovenden smiled at Mr. Cardan’s last remark, but unenthusiastically, in a rather painful indecision between amusement and horror. “But the point is, aren’t there better occupations for a man of sense than indoor sports, even the best of indoor sports?” + 

“No,” said Mr. Cardan, with decision. + 

“For you, perhaps, there mayn’t be. But it seems to me,” Calamy went on, “that I’m beginning to have had enough of sports, whether indoor or out-of-door. I’d like to find some more serious occupation.” + 

“But that’s easier said than done.” Mr. Cardan shook his head. “For members of our species it’s precious hard to find any occupation that seems entirely serious. Eh?” + 

Calamy laughed, rather mournfully. “That’s true,” he said. “But at the same time the sports begin to seem rather an outrage on one’s human dignity. Rather immoral, I would say, if the word weren’t so absurd.” + 

“Not at all absurd, I assure you, when used as you use it.” Mr. Cardan twinkled more and more genially over the top of his glass. “As long as you don’t talk about moral laws and all that sort of thing there’s no absurdity. For, it’s obvious, there are no moral laws. There are social customs on the one hand, and there are individuals with their individual feelings and moral reactions on the other. What’s immoral in one man may not matter in another. Almost nothing, for example, is immoral for me. Positively, you know, I can do anything and yet remain respectable in my own eyes, and in the eyes of others not merely wonderfully decent, but even noble. + 

Ah, what avail the loaded dice? + 

Ah, what the tubs of wine? + 

What every weakness, every vice? + 

Tom Cardan, all were thine. + 

I won’t bore you with the rest of this epitaph which I composed for myself some little time ago. Suffice to say that I point out in the two subsequent stanzas that these things availed absolutely nothing and that, malgré tout, I remained the honest, sober, pure and high-minded man that everyone always instinctively recognizes me to be.” Mr. Cardan emptied his glass and reached out once more for the fiasco. + 

“You’re fortunate,” said Calamy. “It’s not all of us whose personalities have such a natural odour of sanctity that they can disinfect our septic actions and render them morally harmless. When I do something stupid or dirty I can’t help feeling that it is stupid or dirty. My soul lacks virtues to make it wise or clean. And I can’t dissociate myself from what I do. I wish I could. One does such a devilish number of stupid things. Things one doesn’t want to do. If only one could be a hedonist and only do what was pleasant! But to be a hedonist one must be wholly rational; there’s no such thing as a genuine hedonist, there never has been. Instead of doing what one wants to do or what would give one pleasure, one drifts through existence doing exactly the opposite, most of the time⁠—doing what one has no desire to do, following insane promptings that lead one, fully conscious, into every sort of discomfort, misery, boredom and remorse. Sometimes,” Calamy went on, sighing, “I positively regret the time I spent in the army during the war. Then, at any rate, there was no question of doing what one liked; there was no liberty, no choice. One did what one was told and that was all. Now I’m free; I have every opportunity for doing exactly what I like⁠—and I consistently do what I don’t like.” + 

“But do you know exactly what you do like?” asked Mr. Cardan. + 

Calamy shrugged his shoulders. “Not exactly,” he said. “I suppose I should say reading, and satisfying my curiosity about things, and thinking. But about what, I don’t feel perfectly certain. I don’t like running after women, I don’t like wasting my time in futile social intercourse, or in the pursuit of what is technically known as pleasure. And yet for some reason and quite against my will I find myself passing the greater part of my time immersed in precisely these occupations. It’s an obscure kind of insanity.” + 

Young Lord Hovenden, who knew that he liked dancing and desired Irene Aldwinkle more than anything in the world, found all this a little incomprehensible. “I can’t see what vere is to prevent a man from doing what he wants to do. Except,” he qualified, remembering the teaching of Mr. Falx, “economic necessity.” + 

“And himself,” added Mr. Cardan. + 

“And what’s the most depressing of all,” Calamy went on, without paying attention to the interruption, “is the feeling that one will go on like this forever, in the teeth of every effort to stop. I sometimes wish I weren’t externally free. For then at any rate I should have something to curse at, for getting in my way, other than my own self. Yes, positively, I sometimes wish I were a navvy.” + 

“You wouldn’t if you had ever been one,” said Lord Hovenden, gravely and with a knowing air of speaking from personal experience. + 

Calamy laughed. “You’re perfectly right,” he said, and drained his glass. “Shouldn’t we think of going to bed?” + 

VIII + 

To Irene fell the privilege every evening of brushing her aunt’s hair. For her these midnight moments were the most precious in the day. True, it was sometimes an agony for her to keep awake and the suppression of yawns was always painful; three years of incessant practice had not yet accustomed her to her Aunt Lilian’s late hours. Aunt Lilian used to twit her sometimes on her childish longing for sleep; at other times she used to insist, very solicitously, that Irene should rest after lunch and go to bed at ten. The teasing made Irene feel ashamed of her babyishness; the solicitude made her protest that she wasn’t a baby, that she was never tired and could easily do with five or six hours’ sleep a night. The important thing, she had found, was not to be seen yawning by Aunt Lilian and always to look fresh and lively. If Aunt Lilian noticed nothing there was neither teasing nor solicitude. + 

But in any case, every inconvenience was paid for a thousand times by the delights of these confidential conversations in front of the dressing-table mirror. While the young girl brushed and brushed away at the long tresses of pale golden-brown hair, Mrs. Aldwinkle, her eyes shut, and with an expression of beatitude on her face⁠—for she took a cat’s pleasure in the brushing⁠—would talk, spasmodically, in broken sentences, of the events of the day, of her guests, of the people they had met; or of her own past, of plans for the future⁠—hers or Irene’s⁠—of love. On all these subjects Mrs. Aldwinkle spoke intimately, confidentially, without reserve. Feeling that she was being treated by her Aunt Lilian as entirely grownup and almost as an equal, Irene was proud and grateful. Without deliberately setting out to complete the subjugation of her niece, Mrs. Aldwinkle had discovered, in those midnight conversations, the most perfect means for achieving this end. If she talked like this to Irene, it was merely because she felt the need of talking intimately to someone, and because there was nobody else to talk to. Incidentally, however, she had contrived in the process to make the girl her slave. Made her Aunt Lilian’s confidante, invested, so to speak, with a title of honour, Irene felt a gratitude which strengthened her original childish attachment to her aunt. + 

Meanwhile, she had learned to talk with an airy familiarity of many things concerning which young girls are supposed to be ignorant, and of which, indeed, she herself knew, except intellectually and at second hand, nothing. She had learned to be knowing and worldly wise, in the void, so to speak, and with no personal knowledge of the world. Gravely, ingenuously, she would say things that could only be uttered out of the depths of the profoundest innocence, amplifying and making embarrassingly explicit in public things that Mrs. Aldwinkle had only fragmentarily hinted at in the confidential small hours. She regarded herself as immensely mature. + 

Tonight Mrs. Aldwinkle was in a rather gloomy, complaining mood. + 

“I’m getting old,” she said, sighing, and opening her eyes for a moment to look at her image in the glass that confronted her. The image did not deny the statement. “And yet I always feel so young.” + 

“That’s what really matters,” Irene declared. “And besides, it’s nonsense; you’re not old; you don’t look old.” In Irene’s eyes, moreover, she really didn’t look old. + 

“People don’t like one any more when one gets old,” Mrs. Aldwinkle continued. “Friends are terribly faithless. They fall away.” She sighed. “When I think of all the friends⁠ ⁠…” She left the sentence unfinished. + 

All her life long Mrs. Aldwinkle had had a peculiar genius for breaking with her friends and lovers. Mr. Cardan was almost the sole survivor from an earlier generation of friends. From all the rest she had parted, and she had parted with a light heart. It had seemed easy to her, when she was younger, to make new friends in place of the old. Potential friends, she thought, were to be found everywhere, every day. But now she was beginning to doubt whether the supply was, after all, so inexhaustible as she had once supposed. People of her own age, she found, were already set fast in the little social worlds they had made for themselves. And people of the younger generation seemed to find it hard to believe that she felt, in her heart, just as young as they did. They mostly treated her with the rather distant politeness which one accords to a stranger and an elder person. + 

“I think people are horrid,” said Irene, giving a particularly violent sweep with the hairbrush to emphasize her indignation. + 

“You won’t be faithless?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle. + 

Irene bent over and, for all answer, kissed her on the forehead. Mrs. Aldwinkle opened her glittering blue eyes and looked up at her, smiling, as she did so, that siren smile that, for Irene, was still as fascinating as it had ever been. + 

“If only everybody were like my little Irene!” Mrs. Aldwinkle let her head fall forward and once more closed her eyes. There was a silence. “What are you sighing about in that heartbreaking way?” she suddenly asked. + 

Irene’s blush ran tingling up into her temples and disappeared under the copper-coloured fringe. “Oh, nothing,” she said, with an off-handedness that expressed the depth of her guilty embarrassment. That deep intake of breath, that brief and passionate expiry were not the components of a sigh. She had been yawning with her mouth shut. + 

But Mrs. Aldwinkle, with her bias towards the romantic, did not suspect the truth. “Nothing, indeed!” she echoed incredulously. “Why, it was the noise of the wind blowing through the cracks of a broken heart. I never heard such a sigh.” She looked at the reflection of Irene’s face in the mirror. “And you’re blushing like a peony. What is it?” + 

“But it’s nothing, I tell you,” Irene declared, speaking almost in a tone of irritation. She was annoyed with herself for having yawned so ineptly and blushed so pointlessly, rather than with her aunt. She immersed herself more than ever deeply in her brushing, hoping and praying that Mrs. Aldwinkle would drop the subject. + 

But Mrs. Aldwinkle was implacable in her tactlessness. “I never heard anything that sounded so lovesick,” she said, smiling archly into the looking-glass. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s humorous sallies had a way of falling ponderously, like bludgeon strokes, on the objects of her raillery. One never knew, when she was being sprightly, whether to feel sorrier for the victim or for Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. For though the victim might get hard knocks, the spectacle of Mrs. Aldwinkle laboriously exerting herself to deliver them was sadly ludicrous; one wished, for her sake, for the sake of the whole human race, that she would desist. But she never did. Mrs. Aldwinkle always carried all her jokes to the foreseen end, and generally far further than was foreseeable by anyone less ponderously minded than herself. “It was like a whale sighing!” she went on with a frightful playfulness. “It must be a grand passion of the largest size. Who is it? Who is it?” She raised her eyebrows, she smiled with what seemed to her, as she studied it in the glass, a most wickedly sly but charming smile⁠—like a smile in a comedy by Congreve, it occurred to her. + 

“But, Aunt Lilian,” protested Irene, almost in despair, almost in tears, “it was nothing, I tell you.” At moments like this she could almost find it in her to hate Aunt Lilian. “As a matter of fact, I was only⁠ ⁠…” She was going to blurt it out courageously; she was just going to tell Aunt Lilian⁠—at the risk of a teasing or an almost equally unwelcome solicitude: either were better than this⁠—that she had been merely yawning. But Mrs. Aldwinkle, still relentlessly pursuing her fun, interrupted her. + 

“But I guess who it is,” she said, wagging a forefinger at the glass. “I guess. I’m not such a blind stupid old auntie as you think. You imagine I haven’t noticed. Silly child! Did she think I didn’t see that he was very assiduous and that she rather liked it? Did she think her stupid old auntie was blind?” + 

Irene blushed again; the tears came into her eyes. “But who are you talking about?” she said in a voice that she had to make a great effort to keep from breaking and trembling out of control. + 

“What an innocent!” mocked Mrs. Aldwinkle, still very Congreve. And at this point⁠—earlier than was usual with her on these occasions⁠—she had mercy and consented to put poor Irene out of her agony. “Why, Hovenden,” she said. “Who else should it be?” + 

“Hovenden?” Irene repeated with genuine surprise. + 

“Injured innocence!” Mrs. Aldwinkle momentarily renewed her trampling fun. “But it’s sufficiently obvious,” she went on in a more natural voice. “The poor boy follows you like a dog.” + 

“Me?” Irene had been too much preoccupied in following her Aunt Lilian to notice that she in her turn was being followed. + 

“Now don’t pretend,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “It’s so stupid pretending. Much better to be frank and straightforward. Admit, now, that you like him.” + 

Irene admitted. “Yes, of course I like him. But not⁠ ⁠… not in any special way. I’d really not thought of him like that.” + 

A shade contemptuously, benevolently amused, Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled. She forgot her depression, forgot her causes of personal complaint against the universal order of things. Absorbed in the uniquely interesting subject, in the sole and proper study of mankind, she was once more happy. Love⁠—it was the only thing. Even Art, compared with it, hardly existed. Mrs. Aldwinkle was almost as much interested in other people’s love as in her own. She wanted everyone to love, constantly and complicatedly. She liked to bring people together, to foster tender feelings, to watch the development of passion, to assist⁠—when it happened; and Mrs. Aldwinkle was always rather disappointed when it did not⁠—at the tragic catastrophe. And then, when the first love, growing old, had lingeringly or violently died, there was the new love to think of, to arrange, to foster, to watch; and then the third, the fourth.⁠ ⁠… One must always follow the spontaneous motions of the heart; it is the divine within us that stirs in the heart. And one must worship Eros so reverently that one can never be content with anything but the most poignant, most passionate manifestations of his power. To be content with a love that has turned in the course of time to mere affection, kindliness and quiet comprehension is almost to blaspheme against the name of Eros. Your true lover, thought Mrs. Aldwinkle, leaves the old, paralytic love and turns wholeheartedly to the young passion. + 

“What a goose you are!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “I sometimes wonder,” she went on, “whether you’re capable of being in love at all, you’re so uncomprehending, so cold.” + 

Irene protested with all the energy of which she was capable. One could not have lived as long as she had in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s company without regarding the imputation of coldness, of insensitiveness to passion, as the most damning of all possible impeachments. It was better to be accused of being a murderess⁠—particularly if it were a case of crime passionnel. “I don’t know how you say that,” she said indignantly. “I’m always in love.” Had there not been Peter, and Jacques, and Mario? + 

“You may think you have,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle contemptuously, forgetting that it was she herself who had persuaded Irene that she was in love. “But it was more imagination than the real thing. Some women are born like that.” She shook her head. “And they die like that.” One might have inferred from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s words and the tone of her voice that Irene was a superannuated spinster of forty, proved conclusively, after twenty years of accumulated evidence, to be incapable of anything remotely resembling an amorous passion. + 

Irene made no answer, but went on brushing her aunt’s hair. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s aspersions were particularly wounding to her. She wished that she could do something startling to prove their baselessness. Something spectacular. + 

“And I’ve always thought Hovenden an extremely nice boy,” Mrs. Aldwinkle continued, with the air of pursuing an argument. She talked on. Irene listened and went on brushing. + 

IX + 

In the silence and solitude of her room, Miss Thriplow sat up for a long time, pen in hand, in front of an open notebook. “Darling Jim,” she wrote, “darling Jim. Today you came back to me so suddenly and unexpectedly that I could almost have cried aloud in front of all those people. Was it an accident that I picked that stiff leaf from Apollo’s tree and crushed it to fragrance between my fingers? Or were you there? was it you who secretly whispered to the unconscious part of me, telling me to pick that leaf? I wonder; oh, I wonder and wonder. Sometimes I believe that there are no accidents, that we do nothing by chance. Tonight I felt sure of it. + 

“But I wonder what made you want to remind me of Mr. Chigwell’s little shop at Weltringham. Why did you want to make me see you sitting in the barber’s chair, so stiff and grownup, with the wheel of the mechanical brush still turning overhead and Mr. Chigwell saying, ‘Hair’s very dry, Mr. Thriplow’? And the rubber driving band used always to remind me⁠ ⁠…” Miss Thriplow recorded the simile of the wounded snake which had first occurred to her this evening. There was no particular reason why she should have antedated the conceit and attributed its invention to her childhood. It was just a question of literary tact; it seemed more interesting if one said that it had been made up when one was a child; that was all. “I ask myself whether there is any particular significance in this reminder. Or perhaps it’s just that you find me neglectful and unremembering⁠—poor darling, darling Jim⁠—and take whatever opportunity offers of reminding me that you existed, that you still exist. Forgive me, Jim. Everybody forgets. We should all be kind and good and unselfish if we always remembered⁠—remembered that other people are just as much alive and individual and complicated as we are, remembered that everybody can be just as easily hurt, that everybody needs love just as much, that the only visible reason why we exist in the world is to love and be loved. But that’s no excuse for me. It’s no excuse for anyone to say that other people are just as bad. I ought to remember more. I oughtn’t to let my mind be choked with weeds. It’s not only the memory of you that the weeds choke; it’s everything that’s best and most delicate and finest. Perhaps you reminded me of Mr. Chigwell and the bay rum in order to remind me at the same time to love more, and admire more, and sympathize more, and be more aware. Darling Jim.” + 

She put down her pen, and looking out through the open window at the starry sky she tried to think of him, tried to think of death. But it was difficult to think of death. It was difficult, she found, to keep the mind uninterruptedly on the idea of extinction, of non-life instead of life, of nothingness. In books one reads about sages meditating. She herself had often tried to meditate. But somehow it never seemed to come to much. All sorts of little irrelevant thoughts kept coming into her head. There was no focusing death, no keeping it steadily under the mind’s eye. In the end she found herself reading through what she had written putting in a stop here and there, correcting slips in the style, where it seemed to be too formal, too made-up, insufficiently spontaneous and unsuitable to the secret diary. + 

At the end of the last paragraph she added another “darling Jim,” and she repeated the words to herself, aloud, again and again. The exercise produced its usual effect; she felt the tears coming into her eyes. + 

The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshippers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels. + 

“Darling Jim, darling Jim.” Miss Thriplow had found the form of words for her worship. “Darling Jim.” The tears did her good; she felt better, kinder, softer. And then, suddenly, she seemed to be listening to herself from outside. “Darling Jim.” But did she really care at all? Wasn’t it all a comedy, all a pretence? He had died so long ago; he had nothing to do with her now. Why should she care or remember? And all this systematic thinking about him, this writing of things in a secret diary devoted to his memory⁠—wasn’t all that merely for the sake of keeping her emotions in training? Wasn’t she deliberately scratching her heart to make it bleed, and then writing stories with the red fluid? + 

Miss Thriplow put away the thoughts as soon as they occurred to her: put them aside indignantly. They were monstrous thoughts, lying thoughts. + 

She picked up her pen again and wrote, very quickly, as though she were writing an exorcizing spell and the sooner it had been put on paper the sooner the evil thoughts would vanish. + 

“Do you remember, Jim, that time we went out in the canoe together and nearly got drowned?⁠ ⁠…” + 