“You should have seen me,” he said, describing his beard.
“I should have been bowled over.”
“You shall see me, then,” said Gumbril. “Ah, what a Don Giovanni. La ci darem la mano, La mi dirai di si, Vieni, non e lontano, Partiam, ben mio, da qui. And they came, they came. Without hesitation. No ‘vorrei e non vorrei,’ no ‘mi trema un poco il cor.’ Straight away.”
“Felice, io so, sarei,” Mrs. Viveash sang very faintly under her breath, from a remote bed of agony.
Ah, happiness, happiness; a little dull, some one had wisely said, when you looked at it from outside. An affair of duets at the cottage piano, of collecting specimens, hand in hand, for the hortus siccus. A matter of integrity and quietness.
“Ah, but the history of the young woman who was married four years ago,” exclaimed Gumbril with clownish rapture, “and remains to this day a virgin—what an episode in my memoirs!” In the enchanted darkness he had learned her young body. He looked at his fingers; her beauty was a part of their knowledge. On the tablecloth he drummed out the first bars of the Twelfth Sonata of Mozart. “And even after singing her duet with the Don,” he continued, “she is still virgin. There are chaste pleasures, sublimated sensualities. More thrillingly voluptuous,” with the gesture of a restaurant-keeper who praises the speciality of the house, he blew a treacly kiss, “than any of the grosser deliriums.”
“What is all this about?” asked Mrs. Viveash.
Gumbril finished off his glass. “I am talking esoterically,” he said, “for my own pleasure, not yours.”
“But tell me more about the beard,” Mrs. Viveash insisted. “I liked the beard so much.”
“All right,” said Gumbril, “let us try to be unworthy with coherence.”