“Have you ever read Petronius?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes, but what an extraordinary girl you are—have you ever read Petronius?”
“It’s the only book in which anyone in my position with my brains could behold herself. Oh, it is such a nightmare. And life is a nightmare, too. After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses. Strange men and strange intimacies. Scenes incredibly grotesque and incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me. Man revealing himself through individual after individual as utterly contemptible. What can I worship? Not my own body soiled by my traffic in it. Not any religion I’ve ever heard of, for in all religions man is set up to be respected. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my conception ever, ever, ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as less repulsive than—ugh! it makes me shudder—but oh, my son, doesn’t it make me laugh....” She rocked herself with extravagant mirth for a moment. Then she began again, staring out in front of her intensely, fiercely, speaking with the monotonous voice of a visionary. “So I worship woman, and in this nightmare city, in this nightmare life, Lily was always beautiful; only beautiful, mind you. I don’t want to worship anything but beauty. I don’t care about purity or uprightness, but I must have beauty. And you came blundering along and kidnapped my lovely girl. You came along, thinking you were going to regenerate her, and you can’t understand that I’m only able to see you in the shape of a frog. It does amuse me to hear you talking to me so solemnly and so earnestly and so nobly ... and all the time I can only see a clumsy frog.”
“But what has all this to do with Petronius? There’s nothing in that romance particularly complimentary to women,” Michael argued.
“It’s the nightmare effect of it that I adore,” Sylvia exclaimed. “It’s the sensation of being hopelessly plunged into a maze of streets from which there’s no escape. I was plunged just like that into London. It is gloriously and sometimes horribly mad, and that’s all I want in my reading now. I want to be given the sensation of other people having been mad before me ... years ago in a nightmare. Besides, think of the truth, the truth of a work of art that seems ignorant of goodness. Not one moderately decent person all through.”
“And you will take Lily back?” Michael asked.
“Yes, yes, of course I will. But not because you ask me, mind. Don’t for heaven’s sake, puff yourself up with the idea that I’m doing anything except gratify myself in this matter.”
“I don’t want you to do it for any other reason,” he said. “I shall feel more secure with that pledge than with any you could think of. By the way, tell me about a man called Walker. Ronald Walker—a painter. He had an affair with Lily, didn’t he?”
“Ronnie Walker? He painted her; that was all. There was never anything more.”
“And Lonsdale? Arthur Lonsdale?”