The Place of the Lion Read Online Free Page B

and the Moorish culture in Spain had lately crept. The maid supplied them with food, and Damaris—to a less nourishing effect, but with a similar efficiency—supplied her father with conversation. He was more than usually thrilled to-day; never had he seen so many butterflies, and yet they had all escaped him.
    â€œThere was a great one on the oak at the top of the hill,” he said, “and it vanished—really vanished—just as I moved. I can’t think what sort it was—I couldn’t recognize it; brown and gold it seemed. A lovely, lovely thing!”
    He sighed and went on eating. Damaris frowned.
    â€œReally, father,” she said, “if it was as beautiful as all that I don’t see how you can bear to go on eating mutton and potatoes so ordinarily.”
    Her father opened his eyes at her. “But what else can I do?” he said. “It was a lovely thing; it was glinting and glowing there. This is very good mutton,” he added placidly. “I’m glad I didn’t miss this too—not without catching the other.”
    Damaris looked at him. He was short and rather plump, and he was enjoying the mutton. Beauty! She didn’t know that she hated him, and certainly she didn’t know that she only hated him because he was her father. Nor did she realize that it was only when she was talking to him that the divine Plato’s remarks on beauty were used by her as if they meant anything more than entries in a card-index. She had of course heard of “defence mechanisms,” but not as if they were anything she could have or need or use. Nor had love and Heloise ever appeared to her as more than a side-incident of Abelard’s real career. In which her judgment may have been perfectly right, but her sensations were wildly and entirely wrong.
    â€œPlato says——” she began.
    â€œO Plato!” answered Mr. Tighe, taking, as if rhythmically, more vegetables.
    â€œâ€”that,” Damaris went on, ignoring the answer, “one should rise from the phenomenal to the abstract beauty, and thence to the absolute.”
    Mr. Tighe said he had no doubt that Plato was a very great man and could do it. “But personally,” he added, “I find that mutton helps butterflies and butterflies mutton. That’s why I like lunching out in the open. It was a marvel, that one on the oak. I don’t see what it can have been. Brown and gold,” he added thoughtfully. “It’s very curious. I’ve looked up all my books, and I can’t find anything like it. It’s a pity,” he added irrelevantly, “that you don’t like butterflies.”
    Meaning to be patient, Damaris said, “But, you know, I can’t take, up everything.”
    â€œI thought that was what you just said Plato told you to do,” her father answered. “Isn’t the Absolute something like everything?”
    Damaris ignored this; her father on Plato was too silly. People needed a long intellectual training to understand Plato and the Good. He would probably think that the Good was the same thing as God—like a less educated monk of the Dark Ages. Personification (which was one of her side subjects) was a snare to the unadept mind. In a rare mood of benignity, due to her hopes for her paper, she began to talk about the improvement in the maid’s cooking. If time had to be wasted, it had better be wasted on neutral instead of irritating subjects, and she competently wasted it until it was time to get ready for the meeting.
    As she stepped into Mrs. Rockbotham’s car, she heard the thunder again—far away. She made conversation out of it.
    â€œThere’s the thunder,” she said. “Did it keep you awake last night?”
    â€œIt did rather,” Mrs. Rockbotham said, pressing the self-starter. “I kept on expecting to see the lightning, but there wasn’t a single flash.”
    â€œAnd not a drop