So, getting up, she said with a smile, “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature, Guy—I do really. Now I must go.”
He felt literally intoxicated with gratification. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; an amazingly brilliant creature”—he sucked each word as if it were a lollipop.
Then, the way she affectionately humoured him—that was the way women always treated geniuses: geniuses were apt to seem a trifle ridiculous; probably the impression he made on people was somewhat similar to Swinburne’s.
He got up and tripped across the lawn to a clump of fuchsias.
Yes; he had certainly been very brilliant with Teresa: the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the ... and how witty he had been about the negro ladies!
He really must read a paper on his own views on poetry—to an audience mainly composed of women: The cultivated have, without knowing it, become the Philistines, and, scorning the rude yet lovely Saturnalia of modern life, have refused an angel the hospitality of their fig-tree; Tartuffe, his long, red nose pecksniffing—the day of the Puritans is over; but for the sake of the Lady of Christ’s, let them enjoy undisturbed their domestic paradise regained; then all these subjects locked up so long and now let loose by modern poetry ... yes, it would go like this: The harems have been thrown open, and, though as good reactionaries we may deplore the fact, yet common humanity demands that we should lend a helping hand to the pretty lost creatures in their embroidered shoes; then, about anacoluthons and so on; surely one’s sentences need not hold water if they hold the milk of Paradise; oh, yes ... of course ... and he would end up by reading them a translation of Pindar’s first Olympian Ode, ... Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ ..., and now, ladies and gentlemen, which of you will dare to subscribe to Malherbe’s ‘ce galimatias de Pindare’?
Loud applause; rows of indulgent, admiring, cultured smiles—like the Cambridge ladies when the giver of the Clark lectures makes a joke.
“Guy! I have told you before, I will not have you cracking the fuchsia buds.”
It was the Doña, calling out from the border where, deserted by Arnold but joined by Dick, she was examining and commenting upon each blossom separately, in the manner of La Bruyère’s amateur of tulips.
“All right,” he called back in a small, weak voice, and went up to say, “How d’ye do” to Dick.