The letter would probably be from her friend, Elfrida Penn, and may have contained some slight cause for anxiety, as Elfrida was an hysterical young woman and one apt to mismanage her love-affairs; but Teresa, sitting staring at the comedy through half-closed eyes with fascinated irritation, would be certain that the letter contained nothing but an announcement of Paris models, or the ticket for a charity ball.
Teresa felt like some one of presbyopic and astigmatic sight, doomed to look fixedly all day long at a very small object at very close quarters; and this feeling reached an unusual degree of exacerbation on the day that Concha went up to London to dine with Rory Dundas. At seven o’clock she began to follow every stage of her toilette; the bath cloudy with salts, a bottle of which she was sure to have taken up in her dressing-case; then the silk stockings drawn on—“oh damn that Parker! She’s sent me a pair with a ladder”; silk shift, stays, puffing out her hair, mouth full of gilt hair-pins; again and again pressing the bell till the chambermaid came to fasten up her gown; on with her evening cloak and down into the hall where Rory would be standing waiting in an overcoat, a folded-up opera hat in his hand, his hair very sleek from that loathsome stuff of his—“Hulloooah!” “Hulloa! Hulloa! I say ... some frock!” and then all through dinner endless topical jokes.
Oh it was unbearably humiliating ... and how she longed for Pepa: “Teresa darling! You must be mad. He really isn’t good enough, you know. I’m sure he never opens a book, and I expect he’s disgustingly bloodthirsty about the Germans. But if you really like him we must arrange something—what a pity May-Week is such a long way off.”
What did she see in him? He was completely without intellectual distinction; he had a certain amount of fancy, of course, but fancy was nothing—
Tell me where is Fancy bred?
Not in the heart
Nor in the head
nearly all young Englishmen had fancy—a fancy fed by Alice in Wonderland, and the goblin arabesques on the cover of Punch; a certain romantic historical sense too that thrills to Puck of Pook’s Hill and the Three Musketeers—oh yes, and, unlike Frenchmen, they probably all cherish a hope that never quite dies of one day playing Anthony to some astonishingly provocative lady—foreign probably, passionate and sophisticated as the heroine of Three Weeks, mysterious as Rider Haggard’s She. But all that is just part of the average English outfit—national, ubiquitous, undistinguished, like a sense of humour and the proverbial love of fair play.
Yes; their minds were sterile, frivolous ... un-Platonic—that was the word for expressing the lack she felt in the emotional life of the Rorys, the Ebens, and all the rest of that crew; un-Platonic, because they could not make myths. For them the shoemaker at his last, the potter at his wheel, the fishwives of the market-place, new-born babies and dead men, never suddenly grew transparent, allowing to glimmer through them the contours of a stranger world. For them Dionysus, whirling in his frantic dance, never suddenly froze into the still cold marble of Apollo.
Concha came back from her outing uncommunicative and rather cross. She was evidently irritated by the unusual eagerness shown by the Doña with regard to her coming dinner with David Munroe.