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<h2>XI</h2> <h3>COUNTERPOINT</h3> <h4>[To the Marchese Giovanni Visconti Venosta]</h4> Matthew half shut his eyes—as he always did when he particularly wanted to see. "For the first time in my life," he said, "I regret my myopia. Confronted with this room, imagination pales before sight." Virginia looked round—at the strawberry ice brocade, at the gilt, at the Bouchers—so painstaking and so painful—at the palms that seemed to conceal manicurists and barbers. "Look," he continued, "at our hostess. I am sure her ears and her nose take off at night. Her hair is a libel on horsehair and dye." "Oh,"—Virginia's smile was playing like a light over his face—"think of the days when her eyes were like stars and her ears like shells and her hair was curling all over the place." "Virginia," his voice was tender, "where you are there are no more palms, wigs turn into hair, rouge into blushes——" "Matthew," she said, "you are a romantic and I am the only person in the world who knows it." "You are the only person in the world with whom I am in love." "For the moment." "How practical you are!" he teased, "full of forethought and arrière pensées. Isn't the moment the capture of the divine?" She sighed a little—wise with the wisdom of frustrated dreams, and she thought how happy he was—happy with the happiness of iridescent, ever-changing whimsies. "Virginia, does that young man love you?" "Which one?" "The one in spectacles." "I don't think so." "Are you sure?" "One can never be sure." "Of course if he doesn't, it proves that I am right in saying that spectacles are fatal. They prevent people from using either their eyes or their imagination. Shall I go up to him and ask him?" "He would answer: 'I don't understand.'" "And I would explain: 'Virginia is the only lady in orange,' and he would look at you for a moment or two and, holding out his hand in an ecstasy of gratitude, he would say: 'Thank you. Yes, I love her.'" "Matthew," she murmured, "what an unsuitable name." They sat in silence, interfered with only by the necessity of convincing passers-by that they did not want to be interrupted. "Matthew," she said, "do you see that tall fair man?" "The blond beast?" "With a very tall woman." "With gold hair and eyes like cows in pictures of Christ in a manger?" "Yes. He loves her." "How suitable." "But it isn't. He has a red-haired wife." "How unsuitable." "Matthew, do be serious. I like him." "How complicated." "I told him I hated his air of perfunctory but restrained passion, and he laughed." "Any one would have." "And we made friends." "You always make friends with everybody." "You are unsympathetic." "I am, I confess, a little bewildered by the situation. Do I understand that you are suffering from an unrequited passion for a man who is illegitimately attached to a magnificent cow and legitimately bound to a bewitching squirrel?" "Matthew, you really are provoking. What I mean is that he is making a fool of himself." "Why not?" "Because he might do something irrevocable." "Lucky man." She looked at him in desperation—a desperation half exasperation and half enchantment. If only Matthew would sometimes appear serious—there is something so restful about appearances. Instead of which he always remained superlatively unsatisfactory and superlatively irresistible. "Virginia," he said, "let us leave all this and drive round the park and I will talk to you like a lover in a bad book and I will mean every word I say." "We can't go yet," she murmured. "Virginia,"—his voice was urgent—"I will be divinely pompous." That was so like him. He always tried to safeguard the simplest, most sincere moments of his life by inverted commas. It was a little trick that always irritated her. "What an artist you are," she remarked acidly. "Yes, indeed," he assented, smiling her out of her irritation. And then: "I have known you, Virginia, ever since I can remember." "You told me that the first time we met." "It is still true." "How magnificent." It was her turn now to ward off what she was longing for. To be serious with Matthew was a form of disarmament you always regretted. "And knowing you as I do, I recognise the crusading light in your eye and I must point out to you that your altruistic excursions have not always ended by tidying up the situation." "Alas, no." "Now, why plunge into the eternal triangle? There is really no rôle for you unless you propose to supplant the cow. What, by the way, is her name?" "Grace." "I don't like the statuesque," he said, wrinkling up his eyes. "Look at her ecstatic vacant expression. A dangerous combination." Virginia wished she had not given him this theme. He would weave it into such marvellous patterns that she would never be able to get it out intact again. "I must have some more facts," he said. "What is the squirrel called?" "Estelle." "And the hero?" "Edgar." "More and more suitable. What prophetic parents! How admirably they kept their heads at the font. The squirrel is very vivacious—is it a brave front, a blind eye or a shallow heart?" "Estelle is a courageous woman and discreet with the unpierceable reticence of spontaneity." "How delightful. I might try Estelle myself." "You might." "If I said 'I love you,' would she laugh or cry?" "Laugh, I think." "With a little hidden tear in her voice?" "I have my doubts about the hidden tear." "Then she would be no good to me. I like mixed effects." At this moment Grace and Edgar danced by. They were both radiantly fair and a little colossal in scale. Her eyes were half shut and her mouth was half open. "Matthew," Virginia was firm, "something must be done. How can he scale the heights of a great passion carrying that hold-all?" "An empty hold-all isn't so very heavy." "It is if you can't put it down." "Virginia," he said, "your missionary zeal appals me. Why invade the situation? What are you going to tell the man? That he has children?" "No. That he is throwing his life into a cul-de-sac." "He won't believe you." "No." "And it will probably end by his falling in love with you and think what a terrible mess the cow and the squirrel will make." Edgar came up to them. "Will you give me the pleasure of a dance?" "I should love to." Virginia's apricot had become a strand in the pattern of the ball-room. A parma violet lady settled on Matthew like a fly. "I can't think how you have anything left to say to Virginia," she remarked disagreeably. "But I suppose you simply make love to her." "It is not simple at all." "Let us go and sit somewhere," Edgar was saying, and they went into another room. All of our real indiscretions in life come in the form of generalisations. A name is a warning, and we really give ourselves away in abstract philosophisings applied by an intelligent companion to the particular. "Why should we accept ready-made standards?" Edgar said. "None of the great governing forces of life can fit into a ditch of conventions." "No." "Sometimes you have to set out to sea and turn your back on the old familiar coastline." "In a pleasure boat for an excursion." "In a sailing ship for distant seas." "Argosies have a way of turning into penny steamers." "You ought not to say that—you of all people, who sail the seas in a tub with a sunshade." "Oh," she said, "I am at the mercy of the winds. But you have a harbour and an anchor and a flag to fly." "You are thinking that I'm a fool." "Yes." "One must sometimes cut one's losses." "One must sometimes cut one's gains—a much more difficult thing." "You can't throw away light." "The world is brighter with your back to the sun." "Virginia," he said, "I have made up my mind." "What can I say? I am helpless. I see you going shipwreck on dummy rocks—the water let in by a penknife." "You are cruel." "Don't you think I know those frontiers, when paradise seems but a step away, but you know that it is a step you can't retrace?" "Why should you want to go backwards?" She looked past him into space. "Behind us," she murmured, "lie so many things—memories of childhood, dim happy echoes, primroses and hoops and peace shot with laughter. When you have taken your step you daren't look back. Remembering hurts too much. And so you look forward—always forward, knowing that the promised land is behind you." Grace was dancing round and round, wondering how one stopped. Away from him she felt restless and nervous and will-less and incomplete, like a frustrated animal lost and impotent, with smouldering rage in her heart and sulky fires in her eyes. Why didn't he come to release her, to calm the tearing fever of her blood? Again and again she walked through the library and always he was on the sofa with Virginia—Virginia in her orange haze melting into cushions; and sometimes he was bending right forward, his whole body curved into urgency. And when she passed, he half looked up with the tail end of a smile falling as it were accidentally in her direction. Estelle laughed and talked, her feet twinkled, her eyes danced. Marriage, she said, was an altogether delightful thing, quite different from what people thought—— Matthew was introduced to her. He explained that love was so important that it could only be discussed lightly. He said that her hair reminded him ... he wished he could think of what, but he had such a bad memory for metaphors. It took him all his time to remember that a harp was like water and Carpentier like a Greek god. It was funny, wasn't it, to have such a weak head. He thought it came from hay fever—he always had hay fever during the third week of May. It came entirely from honeysuckle. Estelle said that she would like to sit in the library. Grace was in a corner pulling monosyllables out of her mouth like teeth. Virginia was still in the middle of the sofa, a dissolving mass of orange mist. Edgar was talking away all risk of his suiting the action to the word. Estelle was dimpling. "Do you remember," she said to Matthew, "that orange is flame-colour?" "By Jove, yes," he said, "oriflammes and hell fire." A low murmur came from the sofa. "Will you introduce me to your husband?" Matthew asked. They all talked together. "By the way, Virginia," Matthew said, "the young man does love you." "Dear me, how very nice." "It only required me to point it out to him." "Was he pleased?" "Delighted. By the way, Mr. Wilmot,"—Matthew turned to Edgar—"do you ever wear spectacles?" <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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