"What an experience! What a change it's made in the whole of English thought!" the pretty, rose-coloured lady was saying earnestly. "We can never be the same again now. It's set us, as a nation, such an entirely new and higher standard——"
This was very solemn, Gwenna thought. What was it about?
"I can't imagine, now, how we can have existed for so long without that point of view," went on Mrs. Rose-colour. "As I say, the first time I ever saw the Russian Ballet——"
The Russian Ballet—Ah! Gwenna had been with Leslie to see that; she had thought herself in a fairyland of dazzling colour, and of movement as wonderful as that of the flying biplanes. It had been a magic world of enchanted creatures that seemed half-bird, half-flower, who whirled and leaped, light as blown flame, to strangest music.... Gwenna had been dazed with delight; but she could not have talked about it as these people talked. "Mr. Rose-colour," Mr. Smith, and Leslie's whiskered young man were all joining in together now.
"You won't deny that a trace of the Morbid——"
"But that hint of savagery is really the attraction," Mr. Smith explained rather pompously. "We over-civilised peoples, who know no savagery in modern life, who have done with that aspect of evolution, I suppose we welcome something so——"
"Elemental——"
"Primitive——"
"Brutal?" suggested Mrs. Rose-colour, appreciatively.
"And that infinitude of gesture——" murmured the whiskered man, eating asparagus.