his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this
delight. Perhaps somebody had got drunk. But he was saying now that that
time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money
from Demetrios. De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the
servants had all left him.... She saw night invading the villa like a
sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the
dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing
white-faced in the stripped banquet-hall, with the broken body of the
Venus on a bier at his feet and above his head the creaking wings of
birds come to establish desolation under the shattered roof. Why was he
so sad because some people who were members of the parasite class and
were probably devoid of all political idealism had had to stop having a
good time? It was, she supposed, that ethereal abstract sorrow, undimmed
by personal misery and unconfined by the syllogisms of moral judgment,
that poets feel: that Milton had felt when he wrote "Comus" about
somebody for whom he probably wouldn't have mixed a toddy, that she
herself had often felt when the evening star shone its small perfect
crescent above the funeral flame of the day. People would call it a
piece of play-acting nonsense just because of its purity and their
inveterate peering liking for personal emotion, which they seemed to
honour according to its intensity even if that intensity progressed
towards the disagreeable. She remembered how the neighbours had all
respected Mrs. Ball in the house next door for the terrific
manifestations of her abandonment to the grief of widowhood. "Tits,
tits, puir body!" they had said with zestful reverence, and yet the
woman had been behaving exactly as if she was seasick. She preferred the
impersonal pang. It was right. Right as the furniture in the Chambers
Museum was, as the clothes in Redfern's window in Princes Street were,
as this stranger was. And it had a high meaning too. It was evoked by
the end of things, by sunsets, by death, by silence, following song; by