“But if I can’t—I’ve never learnt!”
She laughed.
“But you learnt reading and writing and arithmetic, I suppose, and French and Latin and a lot of other things? I don’t mind betting you were ten or twelve years at school and studied whatever else you could as well. Perhaps you’ve even got your doctor’s degree and know Chinese or Spanish. Am I right? Very well then. But you couldn’t find the time and money for a few dancing lessons! No, indeed!”
“It was my parents,” I said to justify myself. “They let me learn Latin and Greek and all the rest of it. But they didn’t let me learn to dance. It wasn’t the thing with us. My parents had never danced themselves.”
She looked at me quite coldly, with real contempt, and again something in her face reminded me of my youth.
“So your parents must take the blame then. Did you ask them whether you might spend the evening at the Black Eagle? Did you? They’re dead a long while ago, you say? So much for that. And now supposing you were too obedient to learn to dance when you were young (though I don’t believe you were such a model child), what have you been doing with yourself all these years?”
“Well,” I confessed, “I scarcely know myself—studied, played music, read books, written books, travelled—”
“Fine views of life, you have. You have always done the difficult and complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learnt. No time, of course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, I’m not your mother. But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit too far.”
“Don’t scold me,” I implored. “It isn’t as if I didn’t know I was mad.”