ich proves that your vision
was founded on imagination, not on feeling. And the passion for
experience--have you remained so impregnably Pre-Raphaelite as to
believe in that? What real person, with the genuine resources of
instinct, has ever believed in the passion for experience? The passion
for experience is a criticism of the sincere, a creed only of the
histrionic. The passionate person is passionate about this or that,
perhaps about the least significant things, but not about experience.
But Marius, des Esseintes, Edith..."

"But consider," said Eeldrop, attentive only to the facts of Edith's
history, and perhaps missing the point of Appleplex's remarks, "her
unusual career. The daughter of a piano tuner in Honolulu, she secured
a scholarship at the University of California, where she graduated
with Honors in Social Ethics. She then married a celebrated billiard
professional in San Francisco, after an acquaintance of twelve hours,
lived with him for two days, joined a musical comedy chorus, and was
divorced in Nevada. She turned up several years later in Paris and
was known to all the Americans and English at the Cafe du Dome as Mrs.
Short. She reappeared in London as Mrs. Griffiths, published a small
volume of verse, and was accepted in several circles known to us. And
now, as I still insist, she has disappeared from society altogether."

"The memory of Scheherazade," said Appleplex, "is to me that of
Bird's custard and prunes in a Bloomsbury boarding house. It is not my
intention to represent Edith as merely disreputable. Neither is she
a tragic figure. I want to know why she misses. I cannot altogether
analyse her 'into a combination of known elements' but I fail to touch
anything definitely unanalysable.

"Is Edith, in spite of her romantic past, pursuing steadily some hidden
purpose of her own? Are her migrations and eccentricities the sign
of some unguessed consistency? I find in her a quantity of shrewd
observation, an excellent fund of criticism, but I cannot connect them
into any peculiar vision. Her sarcasm at the expense of her friends
is delightful, but I doubt whether it is more than an attempt to mould
herself from outside, by the impact of hostilities, to emphasise her
isolation. Everyone says of her, 'How perfectly impenetrable!' I suspect
that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret."

"I test people," said Eeldrop, "by the way in which I imagine them as
waking up in the morning. I