Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/68

then, to repress one's ironic impulse—one felt that she deserved something. . . . But it wasn't at all that I found it a degradation, or even a derogation, for her to play hockey—that wasn't in the least my feeling. It was more an irritated kind of pity for her fatuity, her lack of humour.

Yet with humour she was otherwise fully equipped; her eyes caught your flying sparkle, and rayed it off into immensity of fun. Her lips—they almost sparkled, too, so mobile, scarlet. Her very hands dimpled sometimes with laughter of rosy finger-tips, and suggestion. . . . In a mad moment, you might have imagined that her feet twinkled, too, in their small jewelled slippers, enjoying the joke like the rest! . . .

And, after a scintillation like that, the girl would do or say something so irritating, so painfully, insistently, commonplace. . . It was incomprehensible, that attitude of hers: she was, as I have told you, my Sphinx of every-day life.

An instance? Oh, as to that, I could overwhelm you with instances. . . . Well, to take the first that occurs . . . and, indeed, it is typical enough, I suppose, for my purpose. . . .

I met them down the river one afternoon of last summer—all of them, Mrs. Silverdale, Mamie, Bella, Lucille, and, I think, one or two vague, familiar young men. Already I had divined that one of these last (I could barely distinguish one from the other) admired Lucille, and plumed himself hugely upon his good taste, which, to him, indeed, one could imagine, reflected itself almost as bad taste—the sort of bad taste that one implies in "caviare to the general"—with a perfect understanding of the difficulties of caviare.

This mental attitude of Lucille's admirer (I think his name was Willie Ruthven) produced in his demeanour a mingling of patronage, awe, and flippancy that formed an amazing whole. Ifit