Отрывок из книги
Rose Macaulay
A Prophetic Comedy
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It was, indeed, not an unpleasing group. Dominating it was Miss Ponsonby herself, very tall, very beautiful, very supple (only a year ago she had been doing her celebrated eel-dance in "Hullo, Peace!"), with long and lovely violet eyes and the best kind of Icilma skin, adorned tastefully but quite unnecessarily with pink paint, white powder, scarlet lip salve, and black lash-darkener. All this was from force of habit: Miss Ponsonby was quite adequately pink, white, scarlet and black in her own person. But, as Kitty observed, having been given by heaven such an absurd thing as a human face, what could one do but make it yet more absurd by these superimposed gaieties? You cannot take a face as a serious thing; it is one of nature's jests, and it is most suitably dealt with as the clown and the pierrot deal with theirs. This was Kitty's point of view; Pansy had none, only habits.
Pansy was guiding and controlling a motor-pram, in which lay the Cheeper, aged four months (he had no Christian name, having so far evaded both the registrar and the font, and presumably no surname, owing to the peculiar circumstances of his parents). The Cheeper's father, Anthony Grammont, was a fair, pale, good-looking, rather tired young man of seven and twenty, with a slightly plaintive voice; he looked as if he shared, only with more languor, Miss Ponsonby's placid and engaging enjoyment of the world; he had been in one of the hottest corners of France through the European War, and had emerged from it a bored and unambitious colonel, deaf of one ear, adorned with a Military Cross, and determined to repay himself for his expenditure of so much time, energy and health by enjoying the fifty or sixty years which, he piously hoped, remained to him, to the full. Which he was now doing. His professional life was passed on the Stock Exchange.
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