The Polo Ground Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

her the delightful capriciousness, the eagerness and glow of vulgar life have hardened into the glitter of good taste and perfect manners. She’s a human crystal. She was brought up in the later feudal tradition of romantic love. In your own language, Vereker, she has been painted in the neo-classic style. At forty-eight, Sutton had outgrown his illusions, but he was stupid enough to give them lip service and always enacted a preposterous make-believe. His was one of those rather undeveloped minds that always think they ought to illuminate their sexual emotions with strings of fairy lamps. However, when the newly married couple discovered that they didn’t live in the same street they were both very amiable about it. Sutton was too indifferent and Angela too polished to quarrel. Figuratively, Sutton sought the Garden of Eden, and Angela was all the time yearning for Paradise. Now, Edmée has always roamed the Garden of Eden. It’s her natural habitat.”
    â€œA very modern Eve, I suppose.”
    â€œNo, I wouldn’t call Edmée modern. Ordinary women, like hymns, are either ancient or modern, but Eve is of all time. She’s Isis, Aphrodite, Venus in a hundred guises and various coloured skins. Edmée is ninety per cent Eve and Sutton had achieved through experience seventy-five per cent Adam. They were bound to fuse. It didn’t take Edmée a week to see that Sutton and Angela were a discrepancy, and that Sutton, to use her own phrase, was ‘tout cousu d’or.’ How distinctly I can visualize her mouth as she said ‘tout cousu d’or’ and the calculating gleam in her Belgian eyes! She translated for my benefit in Americanese—‘he’s lousy with money, Ricky.’ Like all Eves, Edmée is passionately fond of money; not for its own sake, but as something to be quickly exchanged for the fruits of the earth. She came upon Sutton just as I might stumble on a fiver when I was hard up.”
    â€œJust as you might come on me for a tenner would be more accurate,” interrupted Vereker, with malicious glee.
    â€œYou deserve the point, Algernon; I had dropped my guard. To continue the story, there followed the Sutton Stakes.”
    â€œWhat on earth was that?”
    â€œHaven’t you heard the yarn? Bless my soul, I thought it was in a cheap edition by now. I have much pleasure in telling you the scandalous story. It happened about a fortnight after Edmée had arrived in Nice. She had come to Nice because Aubrey Winter was there. As I have said, Aubrey was in love with her, he may be so now for all I know, but her affection for Aubrey was the affection she might have for a comfortable pair of house slippers. Aubrey’s a delightful fool and, though Edmée hurts all her lovers indiscriminately, they are somehow never disillusioned. There’s something of the snake and the bird in her relations with men. Well, to brighten things up the Armadales gave a little dinner and dance at their Villa, Les Aigles d’Or. What part Aubrey had in suggesting that dinner and dance, or whether Sutton was inspired to its realization by Edmée, it would be hard to say. Most likely Aubrey, because if a man’s stupid Fate seems to take a grim delight in making him encompass his own ruin. In any case, the dinner was given, and when Sutton gives a dinner it is a dinner. The cost doesn’t interfere with the dream, and Angela saw to it that the dream was delightful. Angela is all for English dinners, and one of the items on the menu was cygnets. I like that touch of cygnets; it’s pure Angela. But the wines that flowed appealed to my imagination. They proved the deus ex machina in what followed. There were old golden sherry, Château Montbrun, Grand Musigny 1911, Clicquot 1919, Cockburn port 1904, and ’70 brandy. Could anything be more reasonable? This selection of sound liquor produced a Bacchanalian atmosphere among the happy guests.