Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/112

 Campaspe sprayed herself with Guerlain's l'Heure Bleue.

She put out her cigarette and, casting aside her neglige and her mules, got into bed. Pressing a button in the jewelled head of an enamelled tortoise on her bed-table, she extinguished the lights, save that of her reading lamp, a great iridescent dragon-fly, suspended over her bed. Propping herself up against the pillows, she examined the books on her bed-table: plays by Luigi Pirandello, tales by Dopo Kunikida, poems by the Welsh poet, Ab Gwilym, Jésus-la-Caille by Francis Carco, Las Sonatas by Del Valle Inclán, and Aldous Huxley's Mortal Coils. . . . She swept these from the table, leaving one or two at the bottom of the pile. Choosing Rachilde's l'Animale, she read a few lines, and then put it aside. She opened a slight volume by Norman Douglas, and that met a similar fate. Two paragraphs in Ronald Firbank's Vainglory satisfied her. She was not criticizing the authors of these works, but it was her habit to insist that a book should satisfy a mood. With a sigh, again she stretched her arm towards her bed-table, and her fingers closed on a little volume bound in black leather: The Book of Common Prayer.

Opening at random, she happened on the service for St. Mark's Day: I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may