t her love. He drank the
frosted, pale-gold liquid of champagne as if it had been water.
The windows stood wide open in the heat; the garden lay in thick, soft
shadow, where the pitchy shapes of trees could be discerned. There was
not a breath of air to fan the candle-flames above the flowers; but two
large moths, fearful of the heavy dark, flew in and wheeled between the
lights over the diners' heads. One fell scorched into a dish of fruit,
and was removed; the other, eluding all the swish of napkins and the
efforts of the footmen, continued to make soft, fluttering rushes till
Shelton rose and caught it in his hand. He took it to the window and
threw it out into the darkness, and he noticed that the air was thick and
tepid to his face. At a sign from Mr. Dennant the muslin curtains were
then drawn across the windows, and in gratitude, perhaps, for this
protection, this filmy barrier between them and the muffled threats of
Nature, everyone broke out in talk. It was such a night as comes in
summer after perfect weather, frightening in its heat, and silence, which
was broken by the distant thunder travelling low along the ground like
the muttering of all dark places on the earth--such a night as seems, by
very breathlessness, to smother life, and with its fateful threats to
justify man's cowardice.
The ladies rose at last. The circle of the rosewood dining-table, which
had no cloth, strewn with flowers and silver gilt, had a likeness to some
autumn pool whose brown depths of oily water gleam under the sunset with
red and yellow leaves; above it the smoke of cigarettes was clinging,
like a mist to water when the sun goes down. Shelton became involved in
argument with his neighbour on the English character.
"In England we've mislaid the recipe of life," he said. "Pleasure's a
lost art. We don't get drunk, we're ashamed of love, and as to beauty,
we've lost the eye for' it. In exchange we have got money, but what 's
the good of money when we don't know how to spend it?" Excited by his
neighbour's smile, he added: "As to thought, we think so much of what our
neighbours think that we never think at all.... Have you ever watched a
foreigner when he's listening to an Englishman? We 're in the habit of
despising foreigners; the scorn we have for them is nothing to the scorn
they have for us. And they are right! Look at our taste! What is the
good of owning riches if we don't know how to use them?"
"That's rathe
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