Point Counter Point Read Online Free PDF

with seated guests and in the hollow architectural space above them the music intricately pulsed.
    ‘What a pantomime! ‘ said old John Bidlake to his hostess. ‘My dear Hilda, you really must look.’
    ‘Sh-sh!’ Lady Edward protested behind her feather fan. ‘You mustn’t interrupt the music. Besides I am looking.’
    Her whisper was colonial and the r’s of ‘interrupt’ were rolled far back in the throat; for Lady Edward came from Montreal and her mother had been a Frenchwoman. In I897 the British Association met in Canada. Lord Edward Tantamount read a much-admired paper to the Biological Section. ‘One of the coming men,’ the professors had called him., But for those who weren’t professors, a Tantamount and a millionaire might be regarded as already having arrived. Hilda Sutton was most decidedly of that opinion. Lord Edward was the guest, during his stay in Montreal, of Hilda’s father. She took her opportunity. The British Association went home; but Lord Edward remained in Canada.
    ‘Believe me,’ Hilda had once confided to a friend, ‘ I never took so much interest in osmosis before or since.’
    The interest in osmosis roused Lord Edward’s attention. He became aware of a fact which he had not previously noticed; that Hilda was exceedingly pretty. Hilda also knew her woman’s business. Her task was not difficult. At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child. In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself. But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy. Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed. He was a kind of child, but with his childish habits ingrained by forty years of living. Hilda helped him over his paralysing twelve-year-old shynesses, and whenever terror prevented him from making the necessary advances, came half or even all the way to meet him. His ardours were boyish-at once violent and timid, desperate and dumb. Hilda talked for two and was discreetly bold. Discreetly-for Lord Edward’s notions of how young girls should behave were mainly derived from the Pickwick Papers. Boldness undisguised would have alarmed him, would have driven him away. Hilda kept up all the appearance of Dickensian younggirlishness, but contrived at the same time to make all the advances, create all the opportunities and lead the conversation into all the properly amorous channels. She had her reward. In the spring of i898 she was Lady Edward Tantamount.
    ‘But I assure you,’ she had once said to John Bidlake, quite angrily-for he had been making fun of poor Edward, ‘I’m genuinely fond of him, genuinely.’
    ‘In your own way, no doubt,’ mocked Bidlake. ‘In your own way. But you must admit it’s a good thing it isn’t everybody’s way. Just look at yourself in that mirror.’
    She looked and saw the reflection of her naked body lying, half sunk in deep cushions, on a divan.
    ‘Beast!’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference to my being fond of him.’
    ‘Oh, not to your particular way of being fond, I’m sure.’ He laughed. ‘But I repeat that it’s perhaps a good thing that—’
    She put her hand over his mouth. That was a quarter of a century ago. Hilda had been married five years and was thirty. Lucy was a child of four. John Bidlake was forty-seven, at the height of his powers and reputation as a painter; handsome, huge, exuberant, careless; a great laugher, a great worker, a great eater, drinker and taker of virginities.
    ‘Painting’s a branch of sensuality,’ he’ retorted to those who reproved him for his way of life. ‘Nobody can paint a nude who hasn’t learnt the human body by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body. I take my art seriously. I’m unremitting in my preliminary studies.’ And the skin would tighten in laughing wrinkles round his monocle, his eyes would twinkle like a genial satyr’s.
    To Hilda, John Bidlake brought the revelation of her