Edward felt ease and complacency covering him as she spoke, just as he felt the warmth of the fire enveloping his happy body.
“Yes, I love looking at great things,” he said in a proud throaty voice. “I am myself no reader anywhere, out of doors or indoors.”
Emily was still rudely listening. Nobody else seemed to be talking. Emily was laughing a little. The low fire made a poppy-yellow light on the point of her chin, a theatrical light. A duller light was on the soft silk shirt that followed the gentle lines of her breasts.
“I have got an idea again,” said Emily, thumping the pine needles excitedly with both her hands. “Oh, now I come to think of it, I can’t say it so that it sounds a very good idea. It’s about being honest. Did I talk about it before?”
“Yes,” said Tam, and Emily’s body relaxed with disappointment. Edward thought that Tam was as hard as concrete and that certainly Emily would never bear to be laughed at or to be beaten at games. He was quite sure that she would behave badly at games and contradict the umpire.
“Well then,” said Emily rather lamely, “I’ll talk about it again. Don’t you think it’s tremendously interesting to make people be honest against their will? To startle people suddenly into being honest about their standards—about why they cry and why they laugh and when they lie and how much they pose? Posing especially. Although everybody poses, only about ten percent I should think laugh secretly at their own poses. People’s poses make them slow to admit, for instance, that they laugh only when there is something a little dirty in the joke, or that they cry when their conceit is wounded, or that they powder their noses to attract men and not for the health of their complexions, or that they lie. Let’s all pose as being absolutely honest. Lucy, quick—how much do you lie?”
Lucy bit her lips. She made a little tower of sticks at the edge of the fire and tried to convey a little torch of flames to the tower. “Why, Emily, don’t talk like that. I try not to lie at all, of course.”
“Oh, I try frightfully hard to lie,” said Tam. “I am always deeply disappointed if I do not succeed in deceiving everyone I know about what I am and what I have whenever I want to.” He spoke of himself with great confidence and with an obvious certainty that whatever he chose to say about himself was interesting. One felt that he would just as complacently have explained that he always used Vinolia Soap or that he preferred silk socks to woollen ones.
“Oh, you naughty, naughty man!” said Melsie Ponting. “As for me, I only lie to make a funny yarn funnier. I never mean to deceive a fly.”