“You are all standing about. Happy and undisturbed. None of that feeling of darkness and strangeness and the need for a fresh beginning. Tranquillity. As if someone had gone away.”
“The devil; exorcised, poor dear.”
“No but glorious. Making everyone move like a song. And talk. You are all, at once, bursting with talk. All over the flat, in and out of the rooms. George washing up all the time, wandering about with a dish and a cloth and Dora probably doing her hair in a dressing-gown, and cooking. It’s the only place where I can talk exhausted and starving.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Everything. We find ourselves sitting in the bathroom, engrossed—long speeches—they talk to each other, like strangers talking intimately on a ’bus. Then something boils over and we all drift back to the kitchen. Left to herself Dora would go on forever and sit down to a few walnuts at midnight.”
“Mary.”
“But she is an absolutely perfect cook. An artist. She invents and experiments. But he has a feminine consciousness, though he’s a most manly little man with a head like Beethoven. So he’s practical. Meaning he feels with his nerves and has a perfect sympathetic imagination. So presently we are all sitting down to a meal and the evening begins to look short. And yet endless. With them everything feels endless; the present I mean. They are so immediately alive. Everything and everybody is abolished. We do abolish them I assure you. And a new world is there. You feel language changing, every word moving, changed, into the new world. But, when their friends come in the evening, weird people, real cranks, it disappears. They all seem to be attacking things they don’t understand. I gradually become an old-fashioned Conservative. But the evening is wonderful. None of these people mind how far or how late they walk. And it goes on till the small hours.”
“You’re getting your college time with these little people.”
“No. I’m easily the most stupidly cultured person there.”
“Then you’re feeding your vanity.”