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By Root 5832 0

she would press the rhetorical question. ‘Don’t you think so?’ What she liked about a view of distant mountains in a thunderstorm was that it was so like El Greco’s landscapes of Toledo. As for love, why, the whole charm of love, in Molly’s eyes, was its almost infinite capacity for being turned into phrases. You could talk about it for ever. She was talking about it now to Philip Quarles-had been talking about it for the last hour; analysing herself, recounting her experiences, questioning him about his past and his feelings. Reluctantly and with difficulty (for he hated talking about himself and did it very badly) he answered her.

‘Don’t you think,’ she was saying, ‘that the most exciting thing about being in love is the discoveries it enables you to make about yourself?’

Philip duly thought so.

‘I’d no idea how motherly I really was, before I married Jean. I’m so preoccupied now when he gets his feet wet.’

‘I’d be very worried if you got your feet wet,’ said Philip essaying a gallantry. Too stupid! he thought. He was not very good at gallantries. He wished he wasn’t so much attracted by Molly’s rather creamy and florid beauty. He wouldn’t be here making a fool of himself if she were ugly.

‘Too sweet of you,’ said Molly. ‘Tell me,’ she added, leaning towards him with offered face and bosom, ‘why do you like me.’

‘Isn’t it fairly obvious why?’ he answered.

Molly smiled. ‘Do you know why Jean says I’m the only woman he could ever fall in love with?’

‘No,’ said Philip, thinking that she was really superb in her Junonian way.

‘Because,’ Molly went on, ‘according to him, I’m the only woman who isn’t what Baudelaire calls le contraire du dandy. You remember that fragment in Mon Coeur Mis a Nu? “La femme a faim et elle veut manger; soif, et elle veut boire. La femme est naturelle, c’est-a-dire abominable. Aussi est-elle…”’

Philip interrupted her. ‘You’ve left out a sentence,’ he said, laughing. ‘Soif, et elle veut boire. And then: Elle est en rut, et elle veut etre…They don’t print the word in Crepet’s edition; but I’ll supply it if you like.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Molly, rather put out by the interruption. It had spoilt the easy unfolding of a welltried conversational gambit. She wasn’t accustomed to people being so well up in French literature as Philip. ‘The word’s irrelevant.’

‘Is it?’ Philip raised his eyebrows. ‘I wonder.’

‘Aussi est-elle toujours vulgaire,’ Molly went on, hurrying back to the point at which she had been interrupted, ‘c’est-a-dire le contraire du dandy. Jean says I’m the only female dandy. What do you think?’

‘I’m afraid he’s right.’

‘Why “afraid”?’

‘I don’t know that I like dandies much. Particularly female ones.’ A woman who uses the shapeliness of her breasts to compel you to admire her mind—a good character, he reflected, for his novel. But trying in private life, very trying indeed. ‘I prefer them natural,’ he added.

‘But what’s the point of being natural unless you have enough art to do it well and enough consciousness to know how natural you’re being?’ Molly was pleased with her question. A little polishing and it would be epigrammatically perfect. ‘There’s no point in being in love with a person unless you know exactly what you feel and can express it.’

‘I can see a great deal of point,’ said Philip. ‘One doesn’t have to be a botanist or a still-life painter to enjoy flowers. And equally, my dear Molly, one doesn’t have to be Sigmund Freud or Shakespeare to enjoy you.’ And sliding suddenly nearer to her along the sofa, he took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘But what are you thinking about?’ she cried in pained astonishment.

‘I’m not thinking about anything,’ he answered rather angrily from the other end of the arm with which she had pushed him away from her. ‘Not thinking; only wanting.’ He felt humiliated, made a fool of. ‘But I’d forgotten you were a nun.’

‘I’m nothing of the kind,’ she protested. ‘I’m merely civilized. All this pouncing and clawing—it’s really too savage.’ She readjusted a water-waved lock of hair, and began to talk about platonic relationships as aids to