cried, “to see him look round suspiciously,” he whispered, still maintaining the perfect dramatic sharpness of his inflection as he looked round with a descriptive gesture, “to see him wait uneasily to see what’s going to happen—finally to see the look of blissful satisfaction and contentment gradually stealing over his face,” he whispered rapturously, “as he settles back to read The Times in peace—ow!” he cried again, as he cast back his small head with an exultant laugh, “—the whole thing was really too superb!—it really was, you know! Lambert was quite convulsed! We had to lift him up and stretch him out upon the bed before he got his breath again.”
In conversations such as these, in the choice and accent of the words, the sharp crisp and yet blurred inflections of the speech, even in the jaunty nonchalance of hands in pockets, the hang and fold of the coat, in the exultant little laugh and the sharp strong upward movement of the small lean head, there was something alien, suave, and old. To Eugene it seemed to be the style of a life that was far older, more suavely knowing and mature, than any he had ever known, so that at such a time as this, these young boys who on the playing fields had almost the appearance of tousled overgrown urchins, now seemed far more assured and sophisticated than he could ever be.
At the same time, the sound and inflection of their words—their assured exercise of a style of language that knew exactly where to use and how to inflect such words as “very,” “quite,” “superb,” “priceless,” “terribly,” “marvellous,” and so on—this style and use seemed to Eugene almost false, fictional, affected, and theatrical.
He felt this way chiefly because he had read about such people all his life in books and for the most part had heard them speak in this manner only in smart plays upon the stage. He was always connecting these young Englishmen with actors in the theatre, and for a moment his mind would resentfully accuse them of being nothing but cheap and affected actors themselves and, bitterly, of “trying to talk with an English accent”—a phrase which obviously had no meaning, since they were only speaking their own language in the way they had been taught to speak it.
But then, at tea-time, Eugene would see these youths again in Buol’s, flirting, with the clumsy naïveté of a grubby schoolboy, with a leering rawboned hag of a waitress, and obviously getting the thrill of their lives from the spurious grins which this dilapidated strumpet flashed at them through her artificial teeth. Or, as he went up the road towards
