Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [79]
Sylvia, herself, would have cordially acknowledged that it might have been. She knew that, like her intimates--all the Elizabeths, Alixs, and Lady Moiras of the smooth-papered, be-photographed weekly journals--she was man-mad. It was the condition, indeed, of their intimacy as of their eligibilities for reproduction on hot-pressed paper. They went about in bands with, as it were, a cornfield of feather boas floating above them, though to be sure no one wore feather boas; they shortened their hairs and their skirts and flattened, as far as possible, their chest developments, which does give, oh, you know...a certain...They adopted demeanours as like as possible--and yet how unlike--to those of waitresses in tea-shops frequented by city men. And one reads in police court reports of raids what those are! Probably they were, in action, as respectable as any body of women; more respectable, probably, than the great middle class of before the war, and certainly spotless by comparison with their own upper servants whose morals, merely as recorded in the divorce court statistics--that she had from Tietjens--would put to shame even those of Welsh or lowland Scotch villages. Her mother was accustomed to say that she was sure her butler would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an angel--and, as such, delicately minded--wouldn't have the face to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan's offences...
And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn't really even believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn't believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call the maîtresse en titre of any particular man. Passion wasn't, at least, their strong suit; they left that to more--or to less--august circles. The Duke of A...and all the little A's...might be the children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of B...instead of the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of A...Mr C, the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally be the father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor E...The Whig front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells and Cavendishes trading off these--again French--collages sérieux against the matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F and Mr G...But those armours of heavily titled and born front benchers were rather of august politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never got hold of them: the parties to them didn't, for one thing, photograph well, being old, uglyish and terribly badly dressed. They were matter rather for the memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to see the light for fifty years...
The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard of such country houses, but she did not know of any. She imagined that they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had patronymics ending in schen...stein...and baum. There were getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She had in her that much of the papist.
Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord mayors and common council-men. They were the product usually of the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne--of