Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/69

 might actually have been a Georgian celebrity, but for the fact that he preferred talking to writing.

'Just up for the day,' explained Spiller. 'I couldn't stand another hour of the bloody country. Working all day. No company but my own. I find I bore myself to death.' He helped himself to whisky.

'Jesus! The great man! Ha, ha!' The professional drunkard covered his face with his hands and shuddered violently.

'Do you mean to say you came specially for this?' asked Gregory, waving his hand to indicate the party at large.

'Not specially. Incidentally. I heard that Hermione was giving a party, so I dropped in.'

'Why does one go to parties?' said Gregory, unconsciously assuming something of the embittered Byronic manner of the professional drunkard.

'To satisfy the cravings of the herd instinct,' Spiller replied to the rhetorical question without hesitation and with a pontifical air of infallibility. 'Just as one pursues women to satisfy the cravings of the reproductive instinct.' Spiller had an impressive way of making everything he said sound very scientific; it all seemed to come straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Vague-minded Gregory found him most stimulating.

'You mean, one goes to parties just in order to be in a crowd?'

'Precisely,' Spiller replied. 'Just to feel the warmth of the herd around one and sniff the smell of one's fellow humans.' He snuffed the thick hot air.

'I suppose you must be right,' said Gregory. 'It's certainly very hard to think of any other reason.'

He looked round the room, as though searching for other reasons. And surprisingly, he found one: Molly Voles. He had not seen her before; she must have only just arrived.