Burlap’s reaction was unexpectedly different from that of the others. He wagged his head, he smiled with a faraway, whimsical sort of expression. “Yes,” he said, “I think that’s true. A child of nature, malgré tout. You wear disguises, but the simple, genuine person shows through.”
Molly was delighted by what she felt was the highest compliment Burlap could pay her. She had been equally delighted by the others’ denials of her peasanthood. Denial had been their highest compliment. The flattering intention, the interest in her personality were the things that mattered. About the actual opinions of her admirers she cared little.
Burlap, meanwhile, was developing Rousseau’s antithesis between the Man and the Citizen. She cut him short and brought the conversation back to the original theme.
“Human beings and fairies—I think it’s a very good classification, don’t you?” She leaned forward with offered face and bosom, intimately. “Don’t you?” she repeated the rhetorical question.
“Perhaps.” Burlap was annoyed at having been interrupted.
“The ordinary human—yes, let’s admit it—all too human being on the one hand. And the elemental on the other. The one so attached and involved and sentimental—I’m terribly sentimental, I may say. [‘About ath thentimental ath the Thirenth in the Odyththey,’ had been Baron Benito’s classical comment.] The other, the elemental, quite free and apart from things, like a cat; coming and going—and going just as lightheartedly as it came; charming, but never charmed; making other people feel, but never really feeling itself. Oh, I envy them their free airiness!”
“You might as well envy a balloon,” said Burlap, gravely. He was always on the side of the heart.
“But they have such fun.”
“They haven’t got enough feelings to have fun with. That’s what I should have thought.”
“Enough to have fun,” she qualified, “but perhaps not enough to be happy. Certainly not enough to be unhappy. That’s where they’re so enviable. Particularly if they’re intelligent. Take Philip Quarles, for example. There’s a fairy if ever there was one.” She launched into her regular description of Philip. “Zoologist of fiction,” “learnedly elfish,” “a scientific Puck” were a few of her phrases. But the best of them had slipped her memory. Desperately she hunted it, but it eluded her. Her Theophrastian portrait had to go out into the world robbed, this time, of its most brilliantly effective passage and a little marred, as a whole, by Molly’s consciousness of the loss and her desperate efforts, as she poured forth, to make it good. “Whereas his wife,” she concluded, rather painfully aware that Burlap had not smiled as frequently as he should have done, “is quite the opposite of a fairy. Neither elfish, nor learned, nor particularly intelligent.” Molly smiled rather patronizingly. “A man like Philip must find her a little inadequate sometimes, to say the least.” The smile persisted, a smile now of self-satisfaction. Philip had had a faible for her, still had. He wrote such amusing letters, almost as amusing as her own. (“Quand je veux briller dans le monde,” Molly was fond of quoting her husband’s compliments, “je cite des phrases de tes lettres.”) Poor Elinor! “A little bit of a bore sometimes,” Molly went on. “But mind you, a most charming creature. I’ve known her since we were children together. Charming, but not exactly a Hypatia.”
Too much of a fool even to realize that Philip was bound to be attracted by a woman of his own mental stature, a woman he could talk to on equal terms. Too much of a fool to notice, when she had brought them together, how thrilled he had been. Too much of a fool to be jealous. Molly had felt the absence of jealousy as a bit of an insult. Not that she ever gave real cause for jealousy. She didn’t sleep with husbands; she only talked to them. Still, they did do a lot of talking; there was no doubt of that. And wives had been jealous. Elinor’s ingenuous confidingness had piqued her into being more than ordinarily gracious to Philip. But he had started to go round the world before much conversation had taken place. The talk, she anticipated, would be agreeably renewed on his return. “Poor Elinor!” she thought pityingly. Her feelings might have been a little less Christian if she had realized that poor Elinor had noticed the admiring look in Philip’s eye even before Molly had noticed it herself and, noticing, had conscientiously proceeded to act the part of dragoman and go-between. Not that she had much hope or fear that Molly would achieve the transforming miracle. One does not fall very desperately in love with a loud speaker, however pretty, however firmly plump (for Philip’s tastes were rather old-fashioned), however attractively callipygous. Her only hope was that the passions aroused by the plumpness and prettiness would be so very inadequately satisfied by the talking (for talk was all, according to report, that Molly ever conceded) that poor Philip would be reduced to a state of rage and misery most conducive to good writing.
“But of course,” Molly went on, “intelligence ought never to marry intelligence. That’s why Jean is always threatening to divorce me. He says I’m too stimulating. ‘Tu ne m’ennuies pas assez,’ he says; and that what he needs is une femme sédative. And I believe he’s really right. Philip Quarles has been wise. Imagine an intelligent fairy of a man like Philip married to an equally fairyish intelligent woman—Lucy Tantamount, for example. It would be a disaster, don’t you think?”
“Lucy’d be rather a disaster for any man, wouldn’t she, fairy or no fairy?”
“No, I must say, I like Lucy.” Molly turned to her inner storehouse of Theophrastian phrases. “I like the way she floats through life instead of trudging. I like the way she flits from flower to flower—which is perhaps a rather too botanical and poetical description of Bentley
