"Not as far as I know. I'm afraid it isn't likely."
"What a pity we didn't all go out to lunch. If Miss Hodge had to call Rouse's name from a completely deserted table, College would at least be aware that we had no part in this travesty."
"If you didn't have to mark yourself 'out' on the slate before eleven, I would go now, but I haven't the nerve."
"Oh well, perhaps we can do something with our expressions to convey that we consider the whole thing just a bad smell."
It's the being there to countenance it she minds, thought Lucy; while I just want to run away from unpleasantness like a child. Not for the first time, she wished she was a more admirable character.
Madame Lefevre came floating in wearing a cocoa-brown silk affair that was shot with a metallic blue in the high-lights; which made her look more than ever like some exotic kind of dragon-fly. It was partly those enormous headlamps of eyes, of course; like some close-up of an insect in half-remembered Nature «shorts»; the eyes and the thin brown body, so angular yet so graceful. Madame, having got over her immediate rage, had, it seemed, recovered her detached contempt for the human species, and was regarding the situation with malicious if slightly enjoyable distaste.
"Never having attended a wake," she said, "I look forward with interest to the performance today."
"You are a ghoul," Lux said; but without feeling, as if she were too depressed to care greatly. "Haven't you done anything to alter her mind?"
"Oh, yes, I have wrestled with the Powers of Darkness. Wrestled very mightily. Also very cogently, may I say. With example and precept. Who was it who was condemned to push an enormous stone up a hill for ever? Extraordinary how appropriate these mythological fancies still are. I wonder if a ballet of Punishments would be any good? Sweeping out stables, and so forth. To Bach, perhaps. Though Bach is not very inspirational, choreographically speaking. And a great many people rise up and call one damned, of course, if one uses him."
"Oh, stop it," Lux said. "We are going to connive at an abomination and you speculate about choreography!"