Merry Go Round by W. Somerset Maugham Read Free Book Online Page B

Hurrell, bade her good night, and he showed no intention of following their example.
    'You don't want to go to bed yet, do you?' she asked the Dean. 'Let us go into the library.'
    Here Frank took from a drawer his pipe, and helping himself from a tobacco-jar placed in readiness, sat down. Miss Ley, noticing Bella's slight look of surprise, explained.
    'Frank keeps a pipe here and makes me buy his favourite tobacco. It's one of the advantages of old age that you can sit into the small hours of the morning and talk with young men.'
    But when he too was gone, Miss Ley, an old-fashioned hostess solicitous for her guests' comfort, accompanied Bella to her room.
    'I hope you enjoyed my little party,' she said.
    'Very much,' replied Bella. 'But why do you ask Mrs Castillyon? She's dreadfully common, isn't she?'
    'My dear,' answered Miss Ley ironically, 'her husband is a most important person – in Dorsetshire, and her own family has a whole page in the Gentleman's Bible or the Landed Gentry:
    'I shouldn't have thought she was county,' said Bella seriously; 'she seemed to me very vulgar.'
    'She is very vulgar,' answered Miss Ley, 'but it's the sort of vulgarity which is a mark of the highest breeding. To talk too loud and to laugh like a bus-driver, to use the commonest slang and to dress outrageously, are all signs of the grande dame. Often in Bond Street I see women with painted cheeks and dyed hair dressed in a manner which even a courtesan would think startling, and I recognize the leaders of London fashion. ... Good night. Don't expect to see me at breakfast;
that is a meal which only the angels of heaven should eat in company.'
    Miss Langton sat down as though she had no wish to go to bed.
    'Don't go just yet. I want to know all about Mr Kent.'
    Miss Ley, following her friend's example, made herself comfortable in an armchair. Once Miss Dwarris asserted that a virtuous person as a matter of discipline should do every day two things which he disliked, whereupon Miss Ley answered flippantly that then she must be on the direct road to everlasting happiness, for within the twenty-four hours she invariably performed a brace of actions which she thoroughly detested: she got up, and she went to bed. Now, therefore, in no hurry to go to her own room, she proceeded to tell Miss Langton what she knew of Basil Kent. In truth it was not strange that he had attracted Bella's attention, for his appearance was unusual; he managed to wear the conventional evening dress of an Englishman with becoming grace, but one felt, such was his romantic air, he should by rights have borne the armour of a Florentine knight. His limbs were slender and well made, his hands white and comely, and his brown curly hair, worn somewhat long, set off the fine colour of his face; the dark eyes, thin cheeks, and full sensual mouth were set into a passionate wistfulness of expression which recalled again those faces in early Italian pictures wherein the spirit and the flesh seem ever to fight a restless battle – to them the earth is always beautiful, rich with love and warfare, with poetry and deep blue skies, but yet everywhere is disillusion also, and the dark silence of the cloister, even amid the painted turbulence of court or camp, whispers its irresistible appeal. None looking at Basil Kent could imagine that any great ease of life awaited him; through his brown eyes appeared a soul at the same time sensual and ascetic, impulsive and chivalrous, yet so sensitive that the storms and buffets of the world, to which inevitably he exposed himself, must assault him with double violence.
    'Well, he's the son of Lady Vizard,' said Miss Ley.
    'What?' cried Bella, 'you don't mean the woman about whom there was that dreadful case five years ago?'
    'Yes. He was then at Oxford, where Frank and he were bosom friends. It was through Frank that I first knew him. His father, a cousin of the present Kent of Ouseley, died when he was a child, and Basil was brought up by his