Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach, regarded her for a moment in suspicious silence.
‘Do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous failure?’ he asked.
Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.
‘He says he doesn’t mind what we think of him,’ she remarked. ‘He says we don’t care a rap for art of any kind.’
‘I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!’ Rodney exclaimed.
‘I don’t intend to pity you, Mr Rodney,’ Mary remarked, kindly, but firmly. ‘When a paper’s a failure, nobody says anything; whereas now, just listen to them!’
The sound, which filled the room, with its hurry of short syllables, its sudden pauses, and its sudden attacks, might be compared to some animal hubbub, frantic and inarticulate.
‘D’you think that’s all about my paper?’ Rodney inquired, after a moment’s attention, with a distinct brightening of expression.
‘Of course it is,’ said Mary. ‘It was a very suggestive paper.’
She turned to Denham for confirmation, and he corroborated her.
‘It’s the ten minutes after a paper is read that proves whether it’s been a success or not,’ he said. ‘If I were you, Rodney, I should be very pleased with myself.’
This commendation seemed to comfort Mr Rodney completely, and he began to bethink him of all the passages in his paper which deserved to be called ‘suggestive’.
‘Did you agree at all, Denham, with what I said about Shakespeare’s later use of imagery? I’m afraid I didn’t altogether make my meaning plain.’
Here he gathered himself together, and by means of a series of frog-like jerks, succeeded in bringing himself close to Denham.
Denham answered him with the brevity which is the result of having another sentence in the mind to be addressed to another person. He wished to say to Katharine: ‘Did you remember to get that picture glazed before your aunt came to dinner?’ but, besides having to answer Rodney, he was not sure that the remark, with its assertion of intimacy, would not strike Katharine as impertinent. She was listening to what some one in another group was saying. Rodney, meanwhile, was talking about the Elizabethan dramatists.
He was a curious-looking man since, upon first sight, especially if he chanced to be talking with animation, he appeared, in some way, ridiculous; but, next moment, in repose, his face, with its large nose, thin cheeks and lips expressing the utmost sensibility, somehow recalled a Roman head bound with laurel, cut upon a circle of semi- transparent reddish stone. It had dignity and character. By profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very little facility in composition. They condemn whatever they produce. Moreover, the violence of their feelings is such that they seldom meet with adequate sympathy, and being rendered very sensitive by their cultivated perceptions, suffer constant slights both to their own persons and to the thing they worship. But Rodney could never resist making trial of the sympathies of any one who seemed favourably disposed, and Denham’s praise had stimulated his very susceptible vanity.
‘You remember the passage just before the death of the Duchess?’2 he continued, edging still closer to Denham, and adjusting his elbow and knee in an incredibly angular combination. Here, Katharine, who had been cut off by these manoeuvres from all communication with the outer world, rose, and seated herself upon the window-sill, where she was joined by Mary Datchet. The two young women could thus survey the whole party. Denham looked after them, and made as if he were tearing handfuls of grass up by the roots from the carpet. But as it fell in accurately with his conception of life that all one’s desires were bound to be frustrated, he concentrated his mind upon literature, and determined, philosophically, to get what he could out of that.
Katharine was pleasantly excited. A variety of courses was open to her. She knew several people slightly, and at any moment one of them might rise from the floor and come and speak to her; on the other hand, she might select somebody for herself, or she might strike into Rodney’s discourse, to which she was intermittently attentive. She was conscious of Mary’s body beside her, but, at the same time, the consciousness of being both of them women made it unnecessary to speak to her. But Mary, feeling, as she had said, that Katharine was a ‘personality’, wished so much to speak to her that in a few moments she did.
‘They’re exactly like a flock of sheep, aren’t they?’ she said, referring to the noise that rose from the scattered bodies beneath her.
Katharine turned and smiled.
‘I wonder what they’re making such a noise about?’ she said.
‘The Elizabethans, I suppose.’
‘No, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Elizabethans. There! Didn’t you hear them say “Insurance Bill”?’
‘I wonder why men always talk about politics?’ Mary speculated. ‘I suppose, if we had votes, we should too.’3
‘I dare say we should. And you spend your life in getting us votes, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ said Mary, stoutly. ‘From ten to six every day I’m at it.’
Katharine looked at Ralph Denham, who was now pounding his way through the metaphysics of metaphor with Rodney, and was reminded of his talk that Sunday afternoon. She connected him vaguely with Mary.
‘I suppose you’re one of the people who think we should all have professions,’ she said, rather distantly, as if feeling her way among the phantoms of an unknown world.
‘Oh dear no,’ said Mary at once.
‘Well, I think I do,’ Katharine continued, with half a sigh. ‘You will always be able to say that you’ve done something, whereas, in a crowd like this, I feel rather melancholy.’
