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 some one 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 half-way 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 arm-chair.
‘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
