Among Women Only Read Online Free PDF Page A

first party, said that she would have liked to go but still felt too young. The stretcher and the tulle gown came back in my mind.
    "Oh, you could have come," said the little woman in satin. "It was all quite proper. I know people who changed the place of their party right in the middle of it, for fun."
    "Just a nice family evening?" Mariella said, grinning.
    "Really, it was," another girl said.
    "Playing post office in the dark, more likely," Mariella concluded, looking around. The older woman smiled, scandalized and happy. Mariella was by no means a fool; she was the presiding hostess and had been born to such talk. I wondered if she would have known how to make out if she had begun at the bottom like her grandmother. I remembered Morelli's lecture and stopped short.
    We were talking about Morelli, as it happened, and the life he led. By mentioning Rome, some Roman villas, and a few carefully chosen big names, I silenced the most prudish of the group. I let them know that Morelli was at home in certain houses and that Rome was the only city it was never necessary to leave. Everyone came there. Mariella clapped her hands and said that we were having such a good time and that some day she would go to Rome. Someone spoke of Holy Year.
    "Those poor things," Mariella said suddenly. "What are they doing? Shall we go and listen?"
    So our circle broke up and the various groups swarmed around Loris's bow tie, who was holding forth to several eager girls. Just for sport, he and the others had drunk all the cognac and now were squabbling about some question or other—whether in life one could be oneself or whether one had to act. I was surprised to hear a thin girl with bangs, thick lips, and a cigarette mention the name of the brunette I had met the first evening, Momina "Momina said so, Momina said so," she repeated. After Mariella joined our group and all those distinguished gentlemen gathered around, a quavery voice went up: "When you make love, you take off your mask. That's when you're naked." While Mariella was passing drinks, I turned to Morelli. He looked pleased with himself, watching as though he wore a monocle. I caught his eye and when he was close I asked him sotto voce why they didn't send the drunks into the garden. "They'd be out in the open and wouldn't make trouble."
    "You can't," he said. "The indecencies must be kept up only in company; the ladies and heavy fathers must hear them. More orderly that way."
    I asked him who these awful children were. He told me names, giving me to understand that they weren't all respectable people, that the young were corrupted and getting worse: "It's not a question of social class, for God's sake, but after the war and even before it, what has any of that mattered?" According to him, one used to be able to mix with people only on condition of knowing who one was. "Now these people don't know any more who they are or what they want," he said. "They don't even enjoy themselves. They can't talk: they shout. They have the vices of the old, but not the experience..."
    I thought of the girl in the hotel and was about to ask him if he had heard any more about her. But I didn't do it; I realized he was stubborn in such matters, that for all his manners he had hair on his stomach, was graying and getting old. "He's as old as my father," I thought. "He knows so much and doesn't know anything. At least Father kept still and let us alone."
    Morelli was now in the crowd, arguing. He was telling the bearded fellow that they should learn how to handle women instead of discussing nonsense with them, that they should learn how to live and stop being children; while the other, naturally, wanted to convince Morelli and make him agree that in life people are only acting. I have never seen Morelli so annoyed. The women were amused.
    I caught Mariella as she went by, smiling easily at a preoccupied gentleman; I took her aside and said that we—that is, I—wanted to say good night and thank her for