“And had you really never seen her on the stage before last night?” he asked.
“Never!”
“How very odd. I think you and Vansittart must have been about the only people at the West End who have not seen Haroun Alraschid—and yet you are playgoers.”
“I was saving the Apollo for my sister,” she answered, perfectly understanding his drift.
She knew that he was trying to give her pain, that he wanted to make her distrust her husband. Lisa’s conduct had impressed him as it had impressed her, and now he was gloating over her jealous agony.
She turned from him to talk to an aristocratic matron, a large and grand-looking woman, who would have looked better in peplum and chiton than in a flimsy pongee confection which she called her “frock.” The matron had heard the word Apollo, and had a good deal to say about Signora Vivanti, whose performance she deprecated as too realistic.
“Dramatic passion is all very well in a classic opera like Gluck’s Orphée,” she said authoritatively, “but that mixture of passion with broad comedy is too bizarre for my taste.”
“My dear Lady Oriphane, that is just what we want nowadays. We all languish for the bizarre. If we travel we want Africa and pigmy blackamoors. If we go to the play we want to be startled by the outrageous, rather that awed by the sublime. The stories we read must have some strange background, or be dotted about with unknown tongues. An author can interest us in a footman if he will only call him a Kitmutghar. With us the worship of the bizarre marks the highest point of culture.”
Mr. Tivett was there, and chimed in at this stage of the conversation with his pretty little lady-like voice.
“It all means the same thing,” he said; “Neo-paganism. We are the children of a decadent age. We have come to the top of the ladder of life—life meaning civilization and culture—and there is nothing left for us but to climb down again. All the strongest spirits are harking back to the uncivilized. That is at the bottom of the strong man’s passion for Africa. The strong men will all go to Africa, and in a few generations Europe will be peopled by weaklings and hereditary imbeciles. Then the strong men will come back and pour themselves over the civilized world, as the Vandals poured themselves over Italy, and London and Paris will be the spoil of the Anglo-African.”