Read Online Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley - Free Book Online

that pious Catholics don’t much enjoy listening to blasphemy from professional atheists. You might occasionally forget, if your memory were bad. But, I assure you, it needs a first-class memory to forget every time. A first-class memory and a first-class love of mischief.’
    For the first time since the conversation had begun Lady Edward relaxed her ingenuous seriousness. She laughed. ‘You’re too absurd, my dear John.’
    Talking, Bidlake had recovered his good humour; he echoed her laughter. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I don’t in the least object to your playing practical jokes on other people. I enjoy it. But I do draw the line at having them played on me.’
    ‘I’ll do my best to remember next time,’ she said meekly and looked at him with an ingenuousness that was so impertinent, that he had to laugh.
    That had been many years before; she had kept her word and played no more tricks on him. But with other people, she was just as embarrassingly innocent and forgetful as ever. Throughout the world in which she moved her exploits were proverbial. People laughed. But there were too many victims; she was feared, she was not liked. But her parties were always thronged; her cook, her wine merchant and caterer were of the first class. Much was forgiven her for her husband’s wealth. Besides, the company at Tantamount House was always variously and often eccentrically distinguished. People accepted her invitations and took their revenge by speaking ill of her behind her back. They called her, among other things, a snob and a lion hunter. But a snob, they had to admit to her defenders, who laughed at the pomps and grandeurs for which she lived. A hunter who collected lions in order that she might bait them. Where a middle-class Englishwoman would have been serious and abject, Lady Edward was mockingly irreverent. She hailed from the New World; for her the traditional hierarchies were a joke—but a picturesque joke and one worth living for.
    ‘She might have been the heroine of that anecdote,’ old Bidlake had once remarked of her, ‘that anecdote about the American and the two English peers. You remember? He got into conversation with two Englishmen in the train, liked them very much, wanted to renew the acquaintance later and asked their names. “My name,” says one of them, “is the Duke of Hampshire and this is my friend the Master of Ballantrae.” “Glad to meet you,” says the American. “Allow me to present my son Jesus Christ.” That’s Hilda all over. And yet her whole life consists precisely in asking and being asked out by the people whose titles seem to her so comic. Queer.’ He shook his head.’very queer indeed.’
    Turning way from the two discomfited young girls, Lady Edward was almost run down by a very tall and burly man, who was hurrying with dangerous speed across the crowded room.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said without looking down to see who it was he had almost knocked over. His eyes were following the movements of somebody at the other end of the room; he was only aware of a smallish obstacle, presumably human, since all the obstacles in the neighbourhood were human. He checked himself in mid career and took a step to the side, so as to get round the obstacle. But the obstacle was not of the kind one circumvents as easily as that.
    Lady Edward reached out and caught him by the sleeve. ‘Webley!’ Pretending not to have felt the hand on his sleeve, not to have heard the calling of his name, Everard Webley still moved on; he had no wish and no leisure to talk to Lady Edward. But Lady Edward would not be shaken off; she suffered herself to be dragged along, still tugging, at his side.
    ‘Webley!’ she repeated.’Stop! Woa!’ And her imitation of a country carter was so loud and so realistically rustic that Webley was compelled to listen, for fear of attracting the laughing attention of his fellow guests.
    He looked down at her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said gruffly. ‘Sorry I hadn’t