“Oh, I think he’s all right. He’s a dear thing ...” said Concha, hurriedly flinging herself into the breach.
Teresa saw the Doña fumbling for her lorgnette. She had found her tête-à-tête with Guy after his arrival—had she been saying anything to him?
“Uncomfortable, half-baked creature!” said Guy angrily; “he’s like a certain obscure type of undergraduate that used to lurk in the smaller colleges. They were so obscure that no one had ever so much as seen them, but their praises would be sung by even more obscure, though, unfortunately, less invisible admirers, who wore things which I’m sure they called pince-nez, and ran grubby societies, and they would stop one at lectures—simply sweating with enthusiasm—to tell one that Clarke, or Jones, or whatever the creature’s name was, had read a marvellous paper on Edward Carpenter or Tagore at the Neolithic Pagans, or that it was Clarke that had made some disgusting little arts-and-crafts Madonna on the chimneypiece. And then years later you hear that Clarke is chief of a native tribe in one of the islands of the Pacific, or practising yoga in Burmah ... some mysterious will to adventure, I suppose, but all so inconceivably indiscriminating and obscure and half-baked! Well, at any rate, the veil of obscurity has been rent and at last I have seen “Clarke” in the flesh!” and he ended his shrill, gabbled complaint with a petulant laugh.
“He’s not in the least like that, Guy,” laughed Concha; “he’s more like some eighteenth-century highland shepherd teaching himself Greek out of a Greek Testament,” she added, rather prettily.
“Yes, and having religious doubts, which are resolved by an examination of the elaborate anatomy of a horse’s skull found on the moors—it’s all the same, only more picturesque.”
“And why are you so angry with our friend Mr. Munroe, Guy?” asked the Doña.
“Oh, I don’t know! I’m like Nietsche, I hate ‘women, cows, Scotsmen, and all democrats,’” and he gave an irritated little wriggle.
How waspish the little creature had become! But who can draw up a scale of suffering and say that an aching heart is easier to bear than a wounded vanity?
“Well, you haven’t told us anything about Spain,” said Concha.
“Oh, there’s nothing to tell ... it’s a threadbare theme; Childe Harold has already been written.... Of course, the theme of Don Juan lends itself to perennial treatment....”