“And besides!” she suddenly said. “Every one forgets the main ingredient of the souls of fine, eager men. Like the Crusaders, you know. It used to be called the Holy Ghost, but there’s no name for it now....”
But that was the Virginia and the Ivor Marlay of more than seven years later, a man and a woman of thirty, who have come intruding into the Halliday room of that night in 1912: ghosts of serious mien, to relive again their brutal young intolerances of that time.... For Ivor Marlay, now too close to reality to separate the chaff from it, was to-night deciding that “all this” was distasteful to him. The fault was all his, he felt certain. He admired so much in them, and especially the way in which all the desires of their fathers were melted into cheap baubles by the magic of their laughter, which held in it so little superiority and so much conviction. And, admiring all that, he yet found it all distasteful, it seemed so, well, gutless and bloodless, it seemed, somehow, to carry its own rot within it—and as he thought that his eyes fixed on Mr. Kerrison and Pretty Leyton, the one white-faced and thin and limp and little-eyed, the other bubbling and fantastic. Ivor could not see them then as he later grew to see them, that such men are inevitably part of the wonderful comedy of cities. He saw them, and men like them, in a devilish light, he loathed them; and he despised those who suffered them....
Mr. Kerrison was sitting beside Virginia on a window-seat, vigorously talking. He was answering something she had asked, and through the smoke Ivor could see the interest on her face. Mr. Kerrison somehow held that lovely golden creature’s confidence, and Ivor thought: her confidence is wrapped away in him as in the folds of a jelly-fish. Semiramis was the first woman to invent eunuchs, and women have had sympathy for them ever since; for all Kerrisons are eunuchs, large and shining and secretive eunuchs with minutely clever little minds ... and women can tell them what they can’t tell other men. And Ivor, suddenly cheered by laughing at his absurd platitudes, and finding himself by the door, was going from the room.
“You are stealing away!” a voice from behind caught him sharply in the doorway.
“But, Virginia, you are always suspecting me of underhand things!”
“That may be because you never seem to be yourself, never genuine, Ivor,” she said. “You seem always to be straining at a leash, straining but never springing....”
“The devil!” he laughed at her. “You haven’t given me much chance of springing one way or the other, Virginia....” But Virginia looked suddenly very tired indeed.
“Oh, dear!” she sighed childishly. “How trivial we are about trivial things, aren’t we? instead of being grand and indifferent about them, as we like to think we are....” And she smiled quickly, and her smile was like a Red Indian’s, it came and left untouched the gravity of her face.
“You remind me of fire,” said Ivor suddenly, softly. “And fire is a glorious thing because it devours uncleanness yet remains clean. I read that in a funny old book about a great actress, but it somehow applies to you, Virginia....”
She was looking at him gravely, and she said nothing, so that he was ashamed of his affectation. He wasn’t genuine, she had said....