Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley Page B

liked to make everything sound exciting-as exciting as she still felt everything to be. She was only twenty. ‘There were very good reasons for that.’
    ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
    ‘And she was a Canadian, remember, which made the reasons even more cogent.’
    ‘One wonders how Lucy ever…’
    ‘Sh-sh.’
    The other looked round. ‘Wasn’t Pongileoni splendid,’ she exclaimed very loudly, and with altogether too much presence of mind.
    ‘Too wonderful!’ Polly bawled back, as though she were on the stage at Drury Lane. ‘Ah, there’s Lady Edward.’ They were both enormously surprised and delighted. ‘We were just saying how marvellous Pongileoni’s playing was.’
    ‘Were you?’ said Lady Edward smiling and looking from one to the other. She had a deep rich voice and spoke slowly, as though everything she said were very serious and important. ‘That was very nice of you.’ The ‘r’ was most emphatically rolled. ‘He’s an Italian,’ she added, and her face was now quite grave and unsmiling. ‘Which makes it even more wonderful.’ And she passed on, leaving the two young girls haggardly looking into one another’s blushing face.
    Lady Edward was a small, thin woman, with an elegance of figure that, in a low-cut dress, was visibly beginning to run to bones and angles, as were also the aquiline good looks of a rather long and narrow face. A French mother and perhaps, in these later days, the hairdresser’s art accounted for the jetty blackness of her hair. Her skin was whitely opaque. Under arched black eyebrows her eyes had that boldness and insistence of regard which is the characteristic of all very dark eyes set in a pale face. To this generic boldness Lady Edward added a certain candid impertinence of fixed gaze and bright ingenuous expression that was entirely her own. They were the eyes of a child, ‘mais d’un enfant terrible,’ as John Bidlake had warned a French colleague whom he had taken to see her. The French colleague had occasion to make the discovery on his own account. At the luncheon table he found himself sitting next to the critic who had written of his pictures that they were the work either of an imbecile or of a practical joker. Wide-eyed and innocent, Lady Edward had started a discussion on art…. John Bidlake was furious. He drew her aside when the meal was over and gave her a piece of his mind.
    ‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘the man’s my friend. I bring him to see you. And this is how you treat him. It’s a bit thick.’
    Lady Edward’s bright black eyes had never been more candid, nor her voice more disarmingly French-Canadian (for she could modify her accent at will, making it more or less colonial according as it suited her to be the simple-hearted child of the North American steppe or the English aristocrat). ‘But what’s too thick?’ she asked. ‘What have I done this time?’
    ‘None of your comedy with me,’ said Bidlake.
    ‘But it isn’t a comedy. I’ve no idea what’s thick. No idea.’
    Bidlake explained about the critic. ‘You knew as well as I do,’ he said.’ And now I come to think of it, we were talking about his article only last week.’
    Lady Edward frowned, as though trying to recapture a vanished memory. ‘so we were!’ she cried at last, and looked at him with an expression of horror and repentance. ‘Too awful! But you know what a hopeless memory I have.’
    ‘You have the best memory of any person I know,’ said Bidlake.
    ‘But I always forget,’ she protested.
    ‘Only what you know you ought to remember. It’s a damned sight too regular to be accidental. You deliberately remember to forget.’
    ‘What nonsense!’ cried Lady Edward.
    ‘If you had a bad memory,’ Bidlake went on, ‘you might occasionally forget that husbands oughtn’t to be asked to meet the notorious lovers of their wives; you might sometimes forget that anarchists and leader writers in the Morning Post aren’t likely to be the best friends, and