There were many green dresses: jade-green, October green, rusty green, soft green, sea-green, dying green, any shade of green that would suit the expiring voices of formal women in a garden by Watteau. There were thirty-nine green dresses. There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the wrong sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus whose head had been dipped in dressing and then put in a warm place to dry. She dried in patches. A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her bosom to her throat, and she said to Mr. Trehawke Tush, the novelist: “The only decent cocktails you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar, but the people are so odd. My Archie wants to stand for Parliament. What do you think?” Mr. Trehawke Tush, portraits of whose prewar face must be familiar to everyone, was the most successful of the younger novelists, and had earned from Miss Rebecca West the praise that he was “the leader of the spats school of thought.” Mr. Trehawke Tush will go down to history as the originator of Pique as a profitable literary idea. He had hit on the discovery that English library subscribers will wholeheartedly bear with any racy and illegal relation between the sexes if the same is caused by Pique. He had observed that the whole purpose of a “bestseller” is to justify a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of suburban matrons. He had observed that in no current English novel was there ever a mention of any woman having a lover because she wanted a lover: she always took a lover because something had upset her, as in real life she might take an aspirin. Mr. Trehawke Tush had then created Pique, and was spoken of as a “brilliant feminine psychologist.” Since the rise of Mr. Trehawke Tush no reviewer will take any count of a writer as a “brilliant feminine psychologist” unless he can explain the regrettable adultery of his leading female character by the word Pique. This will also persuade Punch reviewers to consider the tale wholesome. Mr. Trehawke Tush was up to all those dodges. He said: “I have just finished a serial for The Daily Sale. I want to show up this kind of thing, the waste, the Indecency of it. All these girls. I thought the editor might take objection to certain passages, as there is some strong bedroom stuff in it, but he only asked me to change one thing. I had put ‘he kissed her where he would,’ and so I changed it to ‘as he would.’ ”
In a corner far across the crowded room sat Venice Pollen, most sedately between her father and her mother. We waved, and decided that it was too crowded to dance; but we did not know, Venice and I, that we were met that night in darkness.
Observe Venice. We will always be found on Venice’s side, and why? because she is a darling. Mark her now, and how the smoke about her clears, how clean she is, and so excited! For Venice! You know she is excited because she is so still, there between her hard father and her monstrous fat mother. Mark her there, a green flower with a mad golden head. And her eyes are blue, mad blue, and she is the queen of ten thousand freckles, of which she is very contemptuous, saying: “Who wants freckles?” And she had a noble forehead which would crinkle when she did not catch what you said, and that was often enough, for she was always talking herself. “Darling, darling, darling!” That is what she would say. And on her lion’s-cub head was a tumult of short dusty-gold hair, which was by nature rebellious, so that she must ever and again be giving her head a fierce backward shake, as though that was going to do any good. Mark her there, so sedate between her hard father and her monstrous fat mother. Not sedate really, Venice! Yet she must be sedate now, for Venice, who by ordinary knew not fear, was as though fascinated by fear of her father, who was none other than Nathaniel Pollen, once of Manchester, but now of Hampshire and Berkeley Square, for was he not as rich as Croesus would have been had Croesus owned the half of the newspapers of England?
So there sat Venice, most excited-still, undoubtedly waiting for Napier. They were lovers, Napier and Venice, and in three days they would be married. Dark, shy, handsome Napier! Favourite of the gods, you might well call him, yet his was that rare, surprising quality which will keep a man poised in continual sunshine, which will never let him droop and laze in the certainty that his sins of omission and casualness will be forgiven him. He was, to talk for a change of the things that matter, in the Foreign Office, and worked conscientiously hard at a career which would—“undoubtedly,” they said, “undoubtedly”—in the course of time place Napier among the most honoured of the nation’s servants; although he would—“undoubtedly,” one can’t help feeling, “undoubtedly”—reach in the course of time the very same pinnacle if he did no work at all, for England and America are the only two countries left in the world wherein men’s charm and good looks are really appreciated by men in the political, high financial, diplomatic, and educational spheres.
Our table faced the swing-doors across the room, and through the crowd of dancers one could see who passed in and out. There was a press of young men standing vaguely by the door, perhaps doubtful whether they should stay or go to return another day. A very haughty and flushed-looking lady, expensively dressed in a dernier cri, which she wore like armour, tramped past them, looked suspiciously into their bland
