Suddenly Alice, who had been lounging semi-somnolent with an extinct cigarette in her jewelled fingers, sat up and said in the uncertain voice of an inexperienced girl who has ceased to count the number of glasses emptied: 

“Shall I recite?  I’ve been trained, you know.”

And, not waiting for an answer, she stood and recited, with a surprisingly correct and sure pronunciation of difficult words to show that she had, in fact, received some training: 

  Helen, thy beauty is to me
  Like those Nicean barks of yore,
  That gently o’er a perfumed sea
  The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
  To his own native shore.

  On desperate seas long wont to roam,
  Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
  Thy naiad airs have brought me home
  To the glory that was Greece,
  To the grandeur that was Rome.

  Lo!  In your brilliant window niche,
  How statue-like I see thee stand,
  The agate lamp within thy hand! 
  Ah, Psyche from the regions which
  Are Holy Land!

The uncomprehended marvellous poem, having startled the whole room, ceased, and the rag-time resumed its sway.  A drunken “Bravo!” came from one table, a cheer from another.  Young Alice nodded an acknowledgment and sank loosely into her chair, exhausted by her last effort against the spell of champagne and liqueurs.  And the naive, big Major, bewitched by the child, subsided into soft contact with her, and they almost tearfully embraced.  A waiter sedately replaced a glass which Alice’s drooping, negligent hand had over-turned, and wiped the cloth.  G.J. was silent.  The whole table was silent.

“Est-ce de la grande poesie?” asked Christine of G.J., who did not reply.  Christine, though she condemned Alice as now disgusting, had been taken aback and, in spite of herself, much impressed by the surprising display of elocution.

“Oui,” said Molder, in his clipped, self-conscious Oxford French.

Two couples from other tables were dancing in the middle of the room.

Molder demanded, leaning towards her: 

“I say, do you dance?”

“But certainly,” said Christine.  “I learnt at the convent.”  And she spoke of her convent education, a triumphant subject with her, though she had actually spent less than a year in the convent.

After a few moments they both rose, and Christine, bending over G.J., whispered lovingly in his ear: 

“Dear, thou wilt not be jealous if I dance one turn with thy young friend?”

She was addressing the wrong person.  Already throughout the supper Aida, ignoring the fact that the whole structure of civilised society is based on the rule that at a meal a man must talk first to the lady on his right and then to the lady on his left and so on infinitely, had secretly taken exception to the periodic intercourse—­and particularly the intercourse in French—­between Christine and Molder, who was officially “hers”.  That these two should go off and dance together was the supreme insult to her.  By ill-chance she had not sufficient physical command of herself.