Point Counter Point

a tangle. She leaned forward to see more clearly in the glass what she was doing. The reflected face approached. “Ma chère,” exclaimed Polly in another tongue, “tu as l’air fatigué. Tu es vieille. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. At your age. Tz, tz!” She clicked her tongue disapprovingly against her teeth and shook her head. “This won’t do, this won’t do. Still, you looked all right tonight. ‘My dear, how sweet you look in white!’ ” She imitated Mrs. Betterton’s emphatic voice. “Same to you and many of them. Do you think I shall look like an elephant when I’m sixty? Still, I suppose one ought to be grateful even for an elephant’s compliments. ‘Count your blessings, count them one by one,’ ” she chanted softly, “ ‘And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.’ Oh, heavens, heavens!” She put down her comb, she violently shuddered and covered her face with her hands. “Heavens!” She felt the blood rushing up into her cheeks. “The gaffe! The enormous and ghastly floater!” She had thought suddenly of Lady Edward. Of course she had overheard. “How could I have risked saying that about her being a Canadian?” Polly moaned, overwhelmed with retrospective shame and embarrassment. “That’s what comes of wanting to say something clever at any cost. And then think of wasting attempted cleverness on Norah! Norah! Oh Lord, oh Lord!” She jumped up, and pulling her dressing gown round her as she went, hurried down the corridor to her mother’s room. Mrs. Logan was already in bed and had turned out the light. Polly opened the door and stepped into darkness.

“Mother,” she called, “Mother!” Her tone was urgent and agonized.

“What is it?” Mrs. Logan answered anxiously out of the dark. She sat up and fumbled for the electric switch by the bed. “What is it?” The light went on with a click. “What is it, my darling?”

Polly threw herself down on the bed and hid her face against her mother’s knees. “Oh Mother, if you knew what a terrible floater I made with Lady Edward! If you knew! I forgot to tell you.”

Mrs. Logan was almost angry that her anxiety had been for nothing. When one has put forth all one’s strength to raise what seems an enormous weight, it is annoying to find that the dumbbell is made of cardboard and could have been lifted between two fingers. “Was it necessary to come and wake me up out of my first sleep to tell me?” she asked crossly.

Polly looked up at her mother. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she said repentantly. “But if you knew what an awful floater it was!”

Mrs. Logan could not help laughing.

“I couldn’t have gone to sleep if I hadn’t told you,” Polly went on.

“And I mayn’t go to sleep until you have.” Mrs. Logan tried to be severe and sarcastic. But her eyes, her smile betrayed her.

Polly took her mother’s hand and kissed it. “I knew you wouldn’t mind,” she said.

“I do mind. Very much.”

“It’s no good trying to bluff me,” said Polly. “But now I must tell you about the floater.”

Mrs. Logan heaved the parody of a sigh of resignation and, pretending to be overwhelmed with sleepiness, closed her eyes. Polly talked. It was after half-past two before she went back to her room. They had discussed, not only the floater and Lady Edward, but the whole party, and everyone who was there. Or, rather, Polly had discussed and Mrs. Logan had listened, had laughed and laughingly protested when her daughter’s comments became too exuberantly high-spirited.

“But Polly, Polly,” she had said, “you really mustn’t say that people look like elephants.”

“But Mrs. Betterton does look like an elephant,” Polly had replied. “It’s the truth.” And in her dramatic stage-whisper she had added, rising from fancy to still more preposterous fancy: “Even her nose is like a trunk.”

“But she’s got a short nose.”

Polly’s whisper had become more gruesome. “An amputated trunk. They bit it off when she was a baby. Like puppies’ tails.”

XII

For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant. They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked. An extra waiter came on at midnight to attend to the valued clients who wished to break the law. Old Sbisa saw to it that their value, to him, was very high. Alcohol was cheaper at the Ritz than at Sbisa’s.

It was about half-past one⁠—“only half-past one,” Lucy complained⁠—when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant.

“Still young,” was Spandrell’s comment on the night. “Young and rather insipid. Nights are like human beings⁠—never interesting till they’re grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to half past. An hour later they’re growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middle-aged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they’re not old. After four they’re in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire’s exhausted itself into disgust. I have rather a weakness for the deathbed scenes, I must confess,” Spandrell added.

“I’m sure you have,” said Lucy.

“And it’s only in the light of ends that you can judge beginnings and middles. The night has just come of age. It remains to be seen how it will die. Till then, we can’t judge it.”

Walter knew how it would die for him⁠—in the midst of Marjorie’s tears and his own complicated misery and exasperation, in an explosion of self-hatred and hatred for the woman to whom he had been cruel. He knew, but would not admit his knowledge; nor that it was already half-past one and that Marjorie would be awake and anxiously wondering why he hadn’t returned.

At five to one Walter had looked at his watch and