SOPHISTICATION
My text is from Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (iv. i. 116) and from Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not ... (II. i. 196; ii. i. 215).
Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys; Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the People at Large and Not just for Our Own Little Class, she played bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained that the best place to buy shoes was Fortnum and Mason’s, and if she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would say: ‘You are not looking at all well, my good young man. Why don’t you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.’ That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had already tried to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that any class could be so Low as that.
. . . . . . .
Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad; she wavered a little to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted slowly towards the immense mirror over the fireplace.
‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’
. . . . . . .
‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it” ... you might have done something to bring us together.’
Tietjens said: