“Oh yes, the Doña would see to it he didn’t singe the King of Spain’s beard twice,” laughed Concha.
Oh yes, of course, that was it! He laughed aloud with relief.
And then followed a discussion, which kept them busy till luncheon, as to whether it could be proved by Mendelism that the frequent singeing of Philip II.’s beard was the cause of his successors having only an imperial.
So here was another proof of the fundamental undramaticness of life as lived under civilised conditions—for ever shying away from an emotional crisis. As usual, the incident had been completely without point; and on and on went the frivolous process of a piece of thistle-down blown by a summer breeze hither, thither, nowhere, everywhere.
3
Before the party broke up there was a little dance at Plasencia. It was to be early and informal so as not to exclude “flappers”; for, as is apt to be the way with physically selfish men, Arnold found grown-up young ladies too exacting to enjoy their society and preferred teasing “flappers.” Fair play to him, he never flirted with them; but he certainly liked them.
So the drawing-room was cleared of furniture, a scratch meal of sandwiches substituted for dinner, and by eight o’clock they were fox-trotting to the music of a hired pianist and fiddler.
The bare drawing-room, robbed of all the accumulated accessories of everyday life, was the symbol of what was happening in the souls of the dancers—Dionysus had come to Thebes, and, at the touch of his thyrsus, the city had gone mad, had wound itself round with vine tendrils, was flowing with milk and honey; where were now the temples, where the market-place?
Teresa, steered backwards and forwards by Bob Norton, felt a sudden distaste for mediæval books—read always with an object; a sudden distaste, too, for that object itself, which was riding her like a hag. Why not yield to life, become part of it, instead of ever standing outside of it, trying to snatch with one’s hands fragments of it, as it went rushing by?