And through the same silence Walter was thinking of that afternoon when, for the first time, he entered Lucy Tantamount’s drawing room. “Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.”
“But what’s her secret?” Marjorie asked. “Why should he have gone mad about her? Because he has gone mad. Literally.”
“Isn’t it rather an obvious secret?” said Elinor. What she found queer was not that Walter should have lost his head about Lucy, but that he should have seen anything attractive in poor Marjorie. “After all,” she continued, “Lucy’s very amusing and alive. And besides,” she added, remembering Philip’s exasperating comments on the dog they had run over at Bombay, “she has a bad reputation.”
“But is that attractive? A bad reputation?” The teapot hung suspended over the cup as she asked.
“Of course. It means that the woman who enjoys it is accessible. No sugar, thanks.”
“But surely,” said Marjorie, handing her the cup, “men don’t want to share their mistress with other lovers.”
“Perhaps not. But the fact that a woman has had other lovers gives a man hope. ‘Where others have succeeded, I can succeed.’ That’s the man’s argument. And at the same time a bad reputation makes him immediately think of the woman in terms of lovemaking. It gives a twist to his imaginations about her. When you met Lola Montes, her reputation made you automatically think of bedrooms. You didn’t think of bedrooms when you met Florence Nightingale. Only sickrooms. Which are rather different,” Elinor concluded.
There was a silence. It was horrid of her, Elinor was thinking, not to feel more sympathetic. But there it was; she didn’t. She reminded herself of the abominable life the poor woman had had—first with her husband, and now with Walter. Really abominable. But those dreadful, dangling, sham jade earrings! And the voice, the earnest manner …
Marjorie looked up. “But is it possible that men can be so easily taken in? By such a cheap bait? Men like Walter. Like Walter,” she insisted. “Can men like that be such … such …”
“Pigs?” suggested Elinor. “Apparently they can. It seems odd, certainly.” Perhaps it would be better, she reflected, if Philip were rather more of a pig and less of a hermit crab. Pigs are human—all too much so, perhaps, but still human. Whereas hermit crabs are doing their best to be molluscs.
Marjorie shook her head and sighed. “It’s extraordinary,” she said with a conviction that struck Elinor as rather ludicrous. “What sort of an opinion can she have of herself?” she wondered. But Marjorie’s good opinion was not for herself so much as for virtue. She had been brought up to believe in the ugliness of vice and the animal part of human nature, the beauty of virtue and the spirit. And cold by nature, she had the cold woman’s utter incomprehension of sensuality. That Walter should suddenly cease to be the Walter she had known and behave “like a pig,” as Elinor rather crudely put it, was to her really extraordinary, quite apart from any personal considerations of her own attractiveness.
“And then you must remember,” Elinor said aloud, “Lucy has another advantage where men like Walter are concerned. She’s one of those women who have the temperament of a man. Men can get pleasure out of casual encounters. Most women can’t; they’ve got to be in love, more or less. They’ve got to be emotionally involved. All but a few of them. Lucy’s one of the few. She has the masculine detachment. She can separate her appetite from the rest of her soul.”
“What a horror!” Marjorie shuddered.
Elinor observed the shudder and was annoyed by it into contradiction.
“Do you think so? It seems to me sometimes rather an enviable talent.” She laughed and Marjorie was duly shocked by her cynicism. “For a boy with Walter’s shyness and timidity,” she went on, “there’s something very exciting about that kind of bold temperament. It’s the opposite of his. Reckless, without scruple, wilful, unconscientious. I can so well understand its going to his head.” She thought of Everard Webley. “Force is always attractive,” she added. “Particularly if one lacks it oneself, as Walter does. Lucy’s obviously a force. You may not like that kind of force.” She herself didn’t much like Webley’s energetic ambition. “But you can’t help admiring the force in itself. It’s like Niagara. Fine, even though you mayn’t want to be standing underneath. May I take another piece of bread and butter?” She helped herself. Out of politeness Marjorie also took another slice. “Delicious brown bread,” Elinor commented, and wondered how Walter could have lived with anyone who crooked the little finger of the hand that held the teacup and who took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea pig—as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.
“But what do you think I ought to do?” Marjorie brought herself finally to ask.
Elinor shrugged her shoulders. “What can you do, but hope he’ll get what he wants and soon be sick of it?”
It was obvious, but Marjorie thought her rather unfeeling, hard, and cruel to have said it.
In London the Quarleses sketchily inhabited what had once been the last of a row of stables in a Belgravian mews. You passed under an archway. A cliff of cream-coloured stucco rose sheer on your left—windowless, for the Belgravians had declined to be aware of the squalid domesticity of their dependents. On the right stretched the low line of stables with the single storey of living rooms above, tenanted now by enormous Daimlers and the families of their chauffeurs.
