"Aren't you getting on rather quick, Dodo?" asked Edith.
"Probably: but Seymour is congédié—how do you say it—spun, dismissed, and quite certainly Nadine has fallen in love with Hugh. There isn't time to be slow, nowadays. If you are slow you are left gasping on the beach like a fish. I still swim in the great waters, thank God."
Dodo got up, and her mood changed utterly. She was never other than genuine, but it had pleased Nature to give her many facets, all brilliant, but all reflecting different-colored lights.
"Oh, my dear, life is so short," she said, "and every moment should be so precious to everybody. I hate going to sleep, for fear I may miss something. Fancy waking in the morning and finding you had missed something, like an earthquake or suffragette riot! My days are reasonably full, but I want them to be unreasonably full. And just now Jack keeps saying, 'Do rest: do lie down: do have some beef-tea.' Just as if I didn't know what was good for David! Edith, he is going to be such a gay dog! All the girls and all the women are going to fall desperately in love with him. He is going to marry when he is thirty, and not a day before, and he will be absolutely simple and unspoiled and a wicked little devil on his marriage morning. And then all his energies will be concentrated on one point, and that will be his wife. He will utterly adore her, and think of nobody else except me. I shall be seventy-four, you perceive, at that time, and so I shall be easy to please. The older one gets the easier one is to please. Already little things please me quite enormously, and big ones, as you also perceive, make me go off my head. Oh, I am sure heaven will be extremely nice, if I ever die, which God forbid; but however nice it is, it won't be the same as this. You agree there I know; you want to make all the music you can first—"
"As a protest against what seems to be the music of heaven," said Edith firmly, "if we may judge by hymn tunes and chants, and the first act of Parsifal, and I suppose the last of Faust, and Handel's oratorios. It is very degrading stuff; all the changes of key are childishly simple, and the proportion of full closes is nearly indecent. And I want another ink-bottle."
Edith whistled a short phrase on her teeth, as a gentle hint to her hostess.
"It's for the flutes," she said, "and the 'cellos take it up two octaves lower."
She grabbed at her music-paper.
"Then the horns start it again in the subdominant," she said, "and all the silly audience will think they are merely out of tune. That's because they got what they didn't expect. To be any good, you must surprise the ear. I'll surprise them. But I want another ink-bottle. And may I have lunch in my room, Dodo, if necessary? I don't know when I shall be able to get up."