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hadn’t meant to live like this or among these third-rate people.
    This scene was not positively comical; however, it was imbued with a strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which continued to grow. The Beautiful is always strange.
    “You seem a sufficiently intelligent young man. You look good enough to eat. Don’t insult me, David, please. Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward! Do you prefer that?”
    He refused, but not without a struggle. “It’s not out of laziness,” he replied very seriously, “but to maintain my dignity.”
    His contempt of Nietzsche, whom she adored, was intolerable. They thrill him, these little demonstrations of womanly certainty.
    She was so trapped and entranced by his passion for her that it seemed to her now as though she might care for him as much as he wished. “But at the same time I’ve been threatening for months to give up la vie sexuelle—and maybe this is the time to do it.” These are the falsifications that survival can require of us. “I’m perfectly willing to take my chances,” she said.
    “I wouldn’t be caught dead in them,” he said.
    “It’s true I’m not clever enough to bake banana bread and carrot bread and raise my own bean sprouts and ‘audit’ seminars and ‘head up’ committees to outlaw war for all time, but people still look at me, David, wherever I go.”
    O dear, o dear, o dear. Colette had it right. Thus women are naturally, inescapably, untruthful.
    Returning to the door of the drawing-room, where there were more people now and everything seemed to be moving in a sort of luminous haze, David stood there watching the dancing, half shutting his eyes in order to see better, and breathing in the languorous scent of the women, which filled the room like a vast, ubiquitous kiss. He kicked the door shut behind him, then stood in the middle of the room, his face screwed up with rage. “What did I tell you?” he started screaming.
    “Well, what a lot of smoke without any flame!” said Eleanor, not looking into anyone’s face. She herself was something of a princess turned into a swine-girl in her own imagination. “Young people are so sad!” she said. “We are so spiritual.”
    And his dark, liquid, nervous eyes, looking anywhere but at her. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
    She took it as a compliment. She came forward, very businesslike, her hat pushed forward like a greedy bird. “And you really don’t despise me?” she asked, smiling through her tears, which was difficult, seeing there were no tears to smile through. The voice was so faint he could just barely hear it. This no longer seemed fun to us.
    Once we have taken Evil into ourselves, it no longer insists that we believe in it.
    Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. We have to read others as they have to read us, and where there is reading there is bound to be misreading, and doubt about which is which. Though I concealed my anger, I tried to make it clear that I was doing so. We love women in so far as they are strangers to us.
    I went out into pale damaged daylight, twilight already falling. “You won’t stay there long!” David exclaimed.

    He spent the next few days chatting with Eleanor and trying (unsuccessfully) to make his way through Ivy Compton-Burnett’s More Women Than Men.
    They need me, don’t you think?

18.
    “What are you laughing at?” said David, raising his voice. He means to be rigorous, not hard; he himself is appalled by how he can sound.
    “Why, David,” said I, sitting up, “do you want to come into my bed?”
    He’d spent half the day, if not all of it, drunk out of his wits. The Magic Mountain sits open but unread on his lap. He wished that he too could be carried away on waves of emotion. But it opens up the night to the risks of the dark side; these should not be underestimated. The wish always to be somewhere else, at least in one’s mind.
    He had a sad