Page:Those Barren Leaves - Huxley - 1925.djvu/282

276 quious angels, his nine naked Muses and the Eternal Father.

When Irene came in, Aunt Lilian was sitting in front of her looking-glass, rubbing skin food into her face.

"It appears," she said, looking at herself in the glass, critically, as Irene had looked at her masterpiece of fine sewing, "that there's such a wonderful electric massage machine. I forget who told me about it."

"Was it Lady Belfry?" Irene suggested. The image of Lady Belfry's face floated up before her mind's eye—smooth, pink, round, youthful looking, but with that factitious and terribly precarious youthfulness of beauty scientifically preserved.

"Perhaps it was," said Mrs. Aldwinkle. "I must certainly get one of them. Write to Harrod's about it to-morrow, will you, darling?”

Irene began the nightly brushing of her aunt's hair. There was a long silence. How should she begin about Hovenden? Irene was thinking. She must begin in some way that would show how really and genuinely serious it all was. She must begin in such a way that Aunt Lilian would have no possible justification for taking up a playful tone about it. At all costs, Aunt Lilian must not be allowed to talk to her in that well-known and dreaded vein of bludgeoning banter; on no account must she be given an opportunity for saying: "Did she think then that her silly old auntie didn't notice?" or anything of that kind. But to find the completely fun-proof formula was not so easy. Irene searched for it long and thoughtfully. She was not destined to find it. For Aunt Lilian, who had also been thinking, suddenly broke the silence.

"I sometimes doubt," she said, "whether he takes any interest in women at all. Fundamentally, unconsciously, I believe he's a homosexualist."

"Perhaps," said Irene gravely. She knew her Havelock Ellis.

For the next half hour Mrs. Aldwinkle and her niece discussed the interesting possibility.