She had been trying to hear what Rory was saying to Concha about the latest _Revue_, and, looking absently across at the silent, aloof David, said vaguely, “Oh, yes of course; he’s Scotch, isn’t he?”
“Inverness-shire, I should think. They’ve got a special accent there—not Scotch, but a sort of genteel English. It’s rather frightening, like suddenly coming upon a pure white tribe in the heart of Darkest Africa, it....”
Teresa heard no more, but yielded to the curious intoxication produced by half a glass of claret, the din of voices, and the hot and brightly lighted room.
By some mysterious anomaly, its action was definitely Apolline, as opposed to Dionysiac—suddenly lifting her from the Bacchic rout on the stage to the marble throne of spectator.
David Munroe, too, sitting silent by the Doña, happened to be feeling it also.
It seemed to him as if the oval mahogany table, on which the lights glinted and the glasses rattled, and all the people sitting round it, except himself, suddenly became an entity, which tore itself away from surrounding phenomena like the launching of a ship, perhaps....
And at that very moment, “the dark Miss Lane” was saying to herself, “It’s like the beginning of the _Symposium_, which seems at first clumsy and long-winded, but by which the real thing—the Feast—is shifted further and further, first to the near past, and then to years and years ago, when they were all children, in the days when Agathon was still in Athens and was making his sacrifice for his victory at the dramatic contest; pushing the rôle of eyewitness through a descending scale of remoteness—from Apollodorus to Phœnix, the son of Philip, from Phœnix to ‘one Aristodemus, a Cydathenæan,’ till finally It—the Feast, small, compact, and far-away—disentangles itself from Space and Time and floats off to the stars, like a fire-balloon, while Apollodorus and his friend, standing down there in the streets of Athens, stare up at it with dazzled eyes.”
“I say, Teresa, I was wondering ... I was thinking of writing an article on ‘the men of the nineties’—do you think I should be justified in calling Oscar Wilde ‘brilliant’?”
Teresa, still bemused, gazed at Guy with puzzled eyes. Why on earth was he looking so odd and self-conscious?