At first, then, he overestimated Pauline. It gave him pleasure to see how she entered the room where he awaited her, how for a moment she left slightly ajar the door which led into her room, a room that seemed to be filled with indescribable, amorphous, purely ethereal extravagances. It delighted him to see how, with graceful helplessness, she placed her arm behind her back to shut the door, whose handle was level with her head. She did this as if she was trying to conceal something dangerous, known only to the two of them, so that every time it seemed for a moment as if they had a forbidden tryst. Her slender hands, scarcely trusting themselves to hold anything, were cool, a pale, fading red which lingered hesitantly on from Pauline’s earlier adolescent years. She used these hands cautiously, as if they were precious limbs that she had been lent; Pauline was conscious of her hands only vaguely, as young birds are of their wings. She extended her arms too far, or she pressed her elbow too anxiously against her breast, she had not yet acquired experience in judging distances. Tunda appreciated the rounded quadrant of her recessed chin seen in profile, and the soft white down which entirely covered her russet face, a kind of silvery moss of youth and beauty.
Nevertheless, he remained aware that this girl, young and undeveloped as she was, came, like her adult counterparts from a world he despised and one which did not deserve its beauty. What kind of people had she been with; to what kind of people was she going? Her days and nights were filled with the ignominious and ridiculous ideas, conversation, experiences and emotions of these people. She went on outings with them, attended balls, visited mountains and spas, fell in love with them, played and danced with them, would marry one of them and bear children which looked as they all did. Reason enough to despise her! Reason enough to suppose that Nature, blind as she is, endows the women of this unnatural caste with beauty just as she makes its men grow straight and healthy. As a monk, exposed to the risk of being attracted by a woman, escapes this danger by means of the unnatural but infallible remedy of abstracting the woman from her charms, so Tunda began to relate Pauline to her world. Soon he found in the depths of her darting, flirtatious, yet always circumspect eyes, in those anatomically indeterminate, medically unfathomable depths, a blank screen against which the images of the world were sadly shattered.
He found in her smooth and well-ordered features the chill stupidity which so resembles charming good nature, unselfconscious grace and naive joy in living. He found that same cheerless, enchanting, elegant stupidity that takes pity on pavement beggars yet tramples a thousand lives with each light step it takes.
It was a rich house. The young people who frequented it were as much at home in the Tattersalls and stadiums of the international sporting world as their fathers had been in the jewel markets from Bucharest to Amsterdam. But just as the slightly colour-blind are insensitive to part of the spectrum and cannot, or only with difficulty, tell violet from blue and blue from dark-green, so these young people lacked a feeling for the beauty, ugliness, naturalness, unnaturalness, charm and disgust of particular situations and particular circumstances. Yes, they lacked this totally. Most of all, Tunda was amazed that, although they were enthusiastic about nature and claimed — indeed believed themselves — to be at one with it, yet they were quite unaffected by nature’s changing moods, exhibiting the same expression on dull, cold days as on warm and bright ones, always finding themselves in that specially animated, hectic and slightly perspiring condition common to participants and ballboys at tennis tournaments, whether in thundery oppression or after-rain freshness, at noon, at sunrise or at sunset. Whether in dinner-jackets or sports-shirts, they were the same. With strong, square, white teeth, like an advertisement for toothpaste, which they bared in place of a smile, with broadly-padded shoulders and narrow waists, with large muscular hands from which all tactile sense had been hygienically removed, with their coloured cravats round their necks, with tidily cut and well-tended hair which showed no hint of ever losing its colour, massaged, showered, always giving the impression of having just emerged from a sea-bathe, he encountered these young men as a species of urban domesticated beasts of prey, kept on the main boulevard, and cared for and supported by the municipality. They spoke with resounding voices, the echo already present within their oral cavities. With imperturbable seriousness they uttered the kind of polite phrases that are listed in the cheapest etiquette books. They were able to discuss every aspect of human life in the tone which the fashionable magazines employ when dutifully dealing with politics, literature and finance on their last pages, and in the smallest print, after a thorough discussion of the season’s fashions. These young people discussed machines and motor-cars in the language of the classified advertisements. Indeed, they seemed to base their style on the advertisement sections of these magazines. They always knew exactly what to say about things and affairs, and what they said stood in roughly the same relation to these as a snapshot taken by an aerial photographer does to the facial expressions of a restive courting couple.
The female members of this society led a pleasure-orientated existence in thin, colourful, light expensive dresses. They walked the pavement on flawlessly shaped legs, in shoes of remarkable — often eccentric — cut, steered motorcars, galloped on horseback, drove light carriages, and called Claude Anet their favourite author. They never appeared singly or in pairs, but gathered in flocks like birds of passage and, like these birds, they were all equally beautiful. Among themselves they could probably be told apart by their particular clothes and bows, by the difference between certain hair-tints and lipstick colours; but to the observer they were children of the same mother, sisters of staggering similarity. The fact that they bore different names was an error of officialdom.
In addition, the majority had English first names. They had not — and this was perfectly reasonable — been called after saints or grandmothers, but after the heroines of American films or English drawing-room comedies. They had been perfectly equipped to take on their particular roles. When they entered a room, a cloud of fragrance and beauty drifting before them and spreading about them, they might be treading a stage or transforming themselves into moving shadows on a screen. It was self-evident that, though so vivacious, they had no life in them. Tunda perceived them not as realities, but as one perceives the girls of vaudeville shows — improbably alike, beautiful and numerous, a kind of daydream despite their sensual charm and physical liveliness — slotted in between the acts of comedians, the outcome of hypnotic suggestion. To Tunda all these girls seemed as unreal as the photographs in the illustrated magazines; when he encountered them, it was as if he had come upon them when turning over a page. And, in reality, they were the charming subjects of the illustrated magazines. They were, indeed, the greater half of the fashionable world, tobogganing in winter in the dazzling snows of St Moritz (gleaming white wool on their bodies), flower-wreathed in February in the carnival procession at Nice, naked on the seashore in summer, returning home in the autumn to inaugurate the winter season with their new hats.