Manhattan Monologues Read Online Free PDF Page B

fingers one perfect rose at the unfortunate but soon-to-be-forgotten girl. After all, wasn't it folly on her part to get mixed up with those preachy, lower-class Christians? And to think I criticized Wintie Tillinghast for admiring Marcus Aurelius in the Gérôme picture! At least the emperor turned his eyes from bloodshed to a learned tract!"
    "Except Wintie Tillingsnob would be turning his eyes to Colonel Mann's Society Notes. Whereas I would have leaped over the railing of my box in a futile attempt to lure away the jaguars with those same sweetmeats you saw me offering to the high-born Roman damsel sitting by me. And when the disgusted jaguars had eaten me instead, an amused Caligula or Nero would have freed you from the arena and invited you to an imperial orgy."
    "
Me?
Why me? Am I the girl in the arena?"
    "Aren't you? Isn't that why you're drawn to the ghastly picture?"
    I blushed. He was uncanny. It was what made people uneasy about him. "We all have our fantasies, I suppose," I muttered. "Harmless fantasies."
    "Are they so harmless? Mightn't they be keys to our personality? Might it not be significant that Agnes Seward sees herself as a martyr?"
    "You really think me such an idiot?"
    "I don't see you as an idiot at all." Miles was suddenly serious, a rare pose for him. If it
was
a pose. "I see you as a very perceptive person in an unperceptive world. And if you ever should be a martyr, you'd be a brave one." I found the odd compliment almost exhilarating. Yet there was apprehension in my reaction as well. Why should Miles have the gift of probing so deeply behind the masks we all had to wear? If it was my fate to play different roles in a tragedy or comedy with whose composition and direction I had had nothing to do, was it not somehow in the cards that the production should end in a martyrdom? If the last act was not to end in a guffaw, should it not terminate on a scaffold? Wasn't anything else banal, presumptuous, even irreligious? And didn't a tragedy have to begin with a seeming success?
    Miles Constable looked younger than his thirty years. He was short and verging on plump, with a clear, fresh, boyish countenance, a smile constantly on his red, full lips, thick wavy chestnut hair and an effervescence of spirit. Had he been taller and more slender, he might have suggested a romantic poet, a Shelley; as it was, one was more put in mind of a cherub, who, like the mythical Dionysus, was capable of impish, perhaps even sinister tricks. Miles had no visible employment nor any known private income to explain his expensive tweeds, his ruby cufflinks, the elegant little dinner parties that he hosted in Delmonico's, and it was rumored that he was not above taking commissions from the grocers and decorators and wine merchants whose products he recommended to his rich friends. And furthermore, there was no recognized family of respectable Constables he could claim as his own. Yet he was never spoken of with the mild contempt that society reserves for its most coddled sycophants. Miles was taken seriously by the great dames of Manhattan society and was not scorned by even the most Philistine of their husbands. They sought him in every capacity but that of son-in-law.
    Now what explained this? I think they may have feared his wit and his startling insight into the most carefully hidden traits of character. My comparison to Dionysus was not casual. There was a legend that this god had survived the pagan era and had inhabited medieval Catholic Europe in disguise. People who met him felt his charm and the amiable freedom of his manners and ways, but they also felt the chill, as from another era, of a system of opposite values that vaguely but ominously threatened them. Maybe it was that Miles, in the traditional role of social climber, never seemed to climb, and that in the expected guise of a flatterer he rarely paid compliments. If Miles really wanted something, what did he really want?
    In his dealings with any pretty