Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [49]
‘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 the ntimental 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 selfsatisfaction. 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