“Mr Molloy says you must feel the Passion in the very depths of your soul.”

“Quite true, but don’t interpret Murtagh simple-mindedly. He knows perfectly well that you can feel Hamlet without believing in ghosts.”

“I see. At least, I think I see.”

“But what about you—for I assume that this inquiry about me is leading up to something about yourself. What about you and the Passion? You’ve been brought up something tremendously devout and Bibliolatrous, if I recollect aright. You mentioned humility nearly wrecking your performance today. Of course it couldn’t have been humility. What was the trouble?”

“I’m in a muddle about my personal life.”

“Still in love with Revelstoke?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Is it serious?”

“As serious as it can be.”

“And I take it from your manner that he doesn’t reciprocate?”

“He doesn’t feel as I do.”

“How does he feel? Now please don’t cry. And what has this got to do with humility?”

“The music—I’m afraid I’m living a very wrong sort of life—and the music made me feel despicable.”

“I’m driving, and I simply can’t do anything about it if you’re going to cry. However, you will find a handkerchief in my left-hand topcoat pocket, and there are others in my portmanteau. But I most earnestly beg you not to cry, but to listen very carefully to me. First, despising yourself isn’t humility; it’s just self-dramatizing. If you’re living in what is pompously called sin with Revelstoke, you’d better be sure you are enjoying it, or you will soon find that you have neither your cake nor your penny. I’ve seen a great deal of sin, one way and another, and the biggest mug in the world is the sinner who isn’t getting any pleasure from it. I’m not taking your situation lightly, though you may think so. I’m talking sense, but I’m too old to get any pleasure out of playing the sage, and making heavy weather with my trifle of worldly experience. My best advice to you is: clarify your thinking about your situation, and act as good sense dictates. Don’t torture yourself with vulgar notions about what the neighbours will think, but get this maxim into your head and reflect on it: chastity is having the body in the soul’s keeping—just that and nothing more.”

They talked all the way to London in this strain. Monica explained, and Sir Benedict advised, but nothing new was said. When at last he stopped at Courtfield Gardens he summed up:

“Remember: you must clarify your thinking. I know it’s the last thing you want to do, but you must do it. If necessary, take a couple of weeks off and go to Paris. Get away from him, and see things in perspective. And when you’ve made up your mind, stick to your decision. And finally, don’t suppose that I’m going to allow this to wreck your work, because I won’t.”

Within an hour, Monica had gone to Tite Street, and discovered Giles in bed with Persis Kinwellmarshe. There was a quarrel of proportions and ferocity of which Monica had never dreamed. It ended with Giles telling her that her chief trouble was that she had no sense of humour.

Two days later she flew to Paris.

Paris in Spring is not an easy place in which to nurse a grudge against oneself. Monica arrived with a long face and a heart full of what she conceived to be self-hatred, but her spirits began to rise almost as soon as she was in Amy Neilson’s pretty house in St Cloud, and before the first evening was over she had confided her trouble to that wise and capable woman. She had not meant to confide; she had fully meant to grapple with the problem alone. She was humiliated by her readiness to spill her story to anyone who might be sympathetic; it seemed so weak. But Amy was an American and a woman, and might understand better than Ripon, who was a man, or Domdaniel, who was English. A little to her surprise, Amy came down flatly on the side of conventional morality.

“These affairs don’t do,” said she. “Particularly not with girls of your temperament. Their tendency is always to harden you, and what would you be like if you were hardened? You’d be very much like your mother, my dear. Oh, different in externals, I’m sure, but very much like her. And in spite of all the nice loyal things you’ve said to me about her from time to time, I don’t think that will answer. What was it you said he told you—that you had no sense of humour? Lucky for him. A woman with a sense of humour would never have taken up with him in the first place. He sounds an impossible person. Oh, a genius, perhaps. Benedict is always discovering geniuses; it’s a craze with him; he’s terribly humble about not being a composer himself, and he’s always exaggerating the talent of young men who show promise. But suppose Giles Revelstoke is a genius? Geniuses are not people to make a woman happy. The best he could do for you would be to marry you and make a drudge of you. No, you’ve done the right thing. Get over him as fast as you can.”

“But perhaps that’s what I’m for—to drudge for somebody far above me. I’m nothing very much, and I know it.”

“Benedict says you can become a very good singer. That’s something. Let me be very frank, dear. You’re not what I call a big person. It’s not just being young, it’s a matter of quality. You’ve got a fair amount of toughness, but essentially you’re delicate and sensitive. You must preserve that. It’s true you have no sense of humour, but very few women have. You should be glad of it. It’s not nearly such a nice or important quality as silly people make out. Wit and high spirits and a sense of fun—yes, they’re wonderful things. But a sense of humour—a real one—is a rarity and can be utter hell. Because it’s immoral, you know, in the real sense of the word: I mean, it makes its own laws; and it possesses the person who has it like a demon. Fools talk about it as though it were the same thing as a sense of balance, but believe me, it’s not. It’s a sense of anarchy, and a sense of chaos. Thank God it’s rare.”

“Maybe what Giles has is a sense of humour.”

“You may be right. He sounds like it. But my advice to you, dear, is to get yourself out of this before you’re hurt worse than you are—which isn’t nearly as badly as you think, I dare say. It isn’t sleeping with a man that makes you a tramp; that’s probably healthy, like tennis or yoghourt. But it’s having your feelings hurt until they scar over that makes you coarse and ugly. You’re not the temperament to survive that sort of thing.”

And thus the pattern of Monica’s Easter in Paris was set. She was getting over Revelstoke. Amy did not refer to the matter again, but she kept Monica busy with French conversation, French literature, shopping, and visits to plays and sights. And Monica, who was beginning to recognize the chameleon strain in her nature, seemed most of the time to fit very well into the stimulating, pleasant, sensible atmosphere which Amy created.

But in her inmost heart she was hurt and puzzled by the failure of all her advisers to comprehend anything of her feelings. They seemed to know what was expedient, and self-preservative, and what would lead to happiness when she was fifty, but they appeared to have no comprehension at all of what it was like to be Monica Gall in love with Giles Revelstoke. Even Ripon, who was not more than a year or so older than herself, could marshal all the facts and make a judgement about them, but not even Domdaniel could grasp the irrationalities of the situation. Must one live always by balancing fact against fact? Had the irrational side of life no right to be lived? The answer did not have to be formed; the irrational things rose overwhelmingly from their deeps whenever she was not strenuously bending her mind to some matter of immediate concern.

Did she want to be a singer? She had been assured so often that it lay within her power to be one, but not since she left Canada had anyone thought of asking if that were truly her desire. What was it, after all, to be a public performer of any kind? One morning, when Amy was busy elsewhere, Monica strayed into the museum of the Opera to pass the time. She had been there before, but under Amy’s firmly enthusiastic guidance; she had been told to marvel, and she had obediently marvelled. But now, alone, she looked about her. How dreary it was! So many pompous busts of Gounod; Gounod’s real immortality was through the wall, on the great stage. But here was the monocle of someone called Diaghilev; Amy had said something about him, but who was he, and what had he done? Where was his immortality? And these pianos of the great—how small they seemed; they bore about them a suggestion that they must have been played by very small men. And these worn-out ballet shoes to which names, presumably great, were attached—was this trash all that the darlings of the public left behind them? There were things here which had belonged to great singers, bits of costume and pitiful, dingy stage jewellery. This was what remained of people who had breathed the muhd as she could hardly hope to breathe it; was this worth the struggle? Would it not be better to be Revelstoke’s drudge and his trull, contributing thereby to something which might live when they both were dead?