The party took place in John’s rooms. First there was a dainty supper; then dancing. It was a heart breaking failure. Everyone tried to save it. A party that needs to be saved is already hopeless. The more everyone tried the worse it was until the lovely, dark-eyed little matron who chaperoned it was on the verge of tears, the girls were divided between sulks and hysterics and the men wondered vaguely what was wrong. It was inevitable. The fluids were perverse. In the first place, the guest of honor flatly declined the r?le of Cinderella. She was not in the least grateful. The little matron on receiving her said: “We’ve tried so long to get you.”
What could be more innocent.
She replied, “Oh-h!” with ascending accent.
The wreck began there. The matron’s tone and manner revealed to her the light in which she was regarded. She was an object of curiosity and a subject of commiseration. One figure she hated as much as the other. To be pitied—particularly that,—was intolerable. She was stung with chagrin and humiliation. It was nobody’s fault,—at least, no more theirs than her own. She might have known it would be so; she had placed herself in this position. None the less, or perhaps all the more for that reason, she could not help behaving in that way which is meant when one[141] says she took it out of them. She took it out of her own sex of course. Her power to do that was extraordinary.
The matron did not know what next to say. That was generally the trouble. None of the women knew how to talk to her. There was nothing in common to talk about, except the circumstances, and these could not be mentioned. At the slightest reference to them she coldly cut the conversation.
“If she couldn’t get into the spirit of it why did she come at all?” one girl asked another.
“That’s easy to see, I should think,” the other said.
What was easy to see was that she was too good looking. No other girl was anywhere near so attractive to the male principle. That was why she could carry off a reckless part. She became more heedless and dangerous about it as the psychic tension increased. She did not care in the least what happened.
It was nothing she did,—nothing you could isolate as an example and criticise. Her behavior was basically na?ve. It was what she was. It was what she had been for thousands of threaded years. It was life at a pitch of intensity, life of a certain quality, looking out of her eyes, seeking itself.
“Don’t you see what she is doing?” asked a feline girl, speaking to John in the dance.
“No,” he said. “I don’t see............