“But Marlay’s not severe, Virginia! He’s a rakish and raffish young man.” But, as usual with Mr. Kerrison, the insolence was in the words rather than the manner, which was ingratiating. Mr. Kerrison was an intellectual architect of a certain reputation and a remarkably anæmic exterior. Kerrison just slops about, people said. He disliked Ivor Marlay because Ivor Marlay had once seen him powdering his nose in a lavatory, because he knew Lois liked him, and because he suspected Virginia of being deeper than her antagonisms....
“He’s suffering,” Virginia said quietly, “from silence. The kind of silence that knows the answer to every question!” Thus were the sayings of the polite and amiable M. Stutz retailed by “My Customers!”
“In the meanwhile,” Ivor was bored enough to say, “why don’t we dance? Or are we not talking about that now?” That manner of his, when irritated, was certainly irritating. You could not like Ivor when he did not like you. He somehow wouldn’t let you. The more he was in the right the less you could like him.
Virginia shook her head, as though a little absent, a little bored; and said something in a low tone to Mr. Kerrison beside her, so that he laughed.... It really was very stupid, all this. Every one was aware of that, and of Ivor Marlay. Everything had been so charming and inconsequent until he had come in—darkly, so as to provoke Virginia, it seemed!—and now everything was pointed and personal. As everything always was when those two met in a room—the atmosphere somehow grew a point, even at the Mont Agel, most difficult of all places in which to be anything but inconsequent! Any one else but Ivor Marlay would have answered Virginia’s first remark in some human sort of way, with a jeer or a laugh or a cry or a grab—but Marlay must go and say the “right” thing, which any fool might know was the wrong thing to say to Virginia.
Ivor Marlay, feeling acutely that he was “out of all this,” just waited for someone to say something. He was damned if he was going to be “put out” by this sort of childishness. And his eyes faintly appealed to Lois Lamprey: who liked him—for she had an instinct about people who might get on—and had watched the little comedy as she watched every comedy, including her own, with lazy intentness. Lois was twenty-five, two years older than Virginia, and it was said that she was more balanced than Virginia.
“Every one is being very typical to-night,” Lois vaguely said, in her deep, soft voice.
“A ballroom,” she said, “is not the place for dancing in, anyway. One should only dance in meadows and green places....”
(It was at that time the fashion to make idiotic remarks in a dogmatic voice. It rather impressed some people.)
“And one should only dance towards the moon and back,” bubbled Pretty Leyton, who couldn’t dance at all. (Thank God that’s over, Ivor thought.) Pretty Leyton always bubbled over like that—and, in bubbling, simply adored you! His business in life was to be an optimist and celibate, and his pleasure in life was to encourage and edit young men’s poetry, dead or alive; and in that the war was to give him his wonderful chance, which he wonderfully took. The poetry Pretty Leyton discovered was often very good, for his was a delicate and conservative taste; but it would have been easier to appreciate the good if one could only have discovered it among the bad, for his was also a delicate and kindly nature. While as for the young poets, of whom many called and all were chosen, he was continually begging his women friends, particularly Lois and Virginia, not to be “too cruel” to them, for they were so sensitive and worth-while. To see and speak to Pretty Leyton in a crowded room was really very comforting, sometimes—which was just as well, since he was always in every room that happened to be crowded, saying: “Isn’t it a marvellous party?” He was so intensely “happy” to be everywhere, people were “so wonderful.” ... And, at some hour or other, in whatever room or company or city you might be in, you would surely espy coming towards you the high, extended waving hand, the swaying shoulder, the mobile eyebrows, the restless hindquarters and the dainty step of Pretty Leyton. And he would be charming, always charming. He gave all his women friends beautifully bound copies of Tristram Shandy, which he said was the only book.
The rest of the circle, innermost of all the young circles of that time and symbolic in the best way of them all, comprised that London “of waiting for the lamps to be lit or of hoping the lamps will never be lit, of waiting for the sun to rise or of hoping the sun will never rise,” as Virginia had said once. Little knowing, Virginia, that the sun was risen so brilliantly on your friends the sooner and more tragically to set....