VI

She could understand a life that spent all its leisure in a café; every day ending in warm brilliance, forgetfulness amongst strangers near and intimate, sharing the freedom and forgetfulness of the everlasting unchanging café, all together in a common life. It was like a sort of dance, everyone coming and going poised and buoyant, separate and free, united in freedom. It was a heaven, a man’s heaven, most of the women were there with men, somehow watchful and dependent, but even they were forced to be free from troublings and fussings whilst they were there⁠ ⁠… the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest⁠ ⁠… she was there as a man, a free man of the world, a continental, a cosmopolitan, a connoisseur of women. That old man sitting alone with a grey face and an extinguished eye was the end of it, but even now the café held him up; he would come till death came too near to allow him movement. He was horrible, but less horrible than he would be alone in a room; he had to keep the rules and manage to behave; as long as he could come he was still in life.⁠ ⁠… White muslin wings on a black straw hat, a well-cut check costume and a carriage, bust forward, an elegant carriage imposing secrets and manners.⁠ ⁠… Miriam turned to watch her proceeding with a vague group of people through the central light towards the outer gloom. Voilà une petite qui est jolie she remarked judicially.⁠— Une jeune fille avec ses parents ⁠—rebuked Mr. Mendizabal. Even he, wicked fast little foreigner did not know how utterly meaningless his words were. He was here, in Ruscino’s quite simply. He sat at home, at the height of his happy foreign expansiveness. He had no sense of desperate wickedness. He gave no help to the sense of desperate wickedness; pouring like an inacceptable nimbus from his brilliant strong head was a tiresome homeliness. She flung forth to the music, the shining fronds of distant palm ferns; sipped her liqueur with downcast eyes and thought of an evening along the digue at Ostend, the balmy air, the telescoping brilliant interiors of the villas, the wild arm-linked masquerading stroll, Elsie had really looked like an unprincipled Bruxelloise⁠ ⁠… foreigners were all innocent in their depravity.⁠ ⁠… To taste the joy of depravity one must be English.⁠ ⁠…