The Tale of Triona. William John Locke

of a clashing rag-time imbecility, did not set all her young nerves vibrating to the point of delicious agony. It was like a mad fanfare heralding her advent in a new world. But soon she found that the blare of the idiot music deadened all other senses. Before her eyes swayed black-and-white things whom at the back of her mind she recognized as men, and various forms all stark flesh, flashing jewels and a maze of colours, whom she knew to be women. The gathering group of her own party seemed but figures of a dream. Her unaccustomed ears could not catch a word of the conventional gambits of conversation opened, on introduction, by her fellow guests. It was only when they passed between the tables of the great restaurant and the horrible noise of the negroid, syncopated parody of tune grew fainter and fainter, and they reached the peace of the terrace side, that the maddening clatter faded from her ears and consciousness of her surroundings returned.

      Then she surrendered herself to huge enjoyment. Both her neighbours had been all over the world and seen all sorts and conditions of men. They were vividly aware of current events. Pride would not allow her to betray the fact that often they spoke of matters far beyond her experience of men and things. Under their stimulus she began to regain the self that, for the past fortnight, the cardboard boxes of London had snowed under.

      “It’s no use asking me,” she said to Mauregard, “whether I’ve been to Monte Carlo or Madagascar or Madame Tussaud’s, for I haven’t. I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve somehow existed at the back of Nowhere, and to-night I’ve come to life.”

      “But where did you come from? The sea foam? Venus Anadyomene?”

      “No, I’m of the other kind. I come from far inland. I believe they call it Shropshire. That oughtn’t to convey anything to you.”

      “Indeed it does!” cried Mauregard. “Was I not at school at Shrewsbury?”

      “No?”

      “But yes. Three years. So I’m Shropshire, too.”

      “That’s delightful,” she remarked; “but it does away with my little mystery of Nowhere.”

      “No, no,” he protested, with a laugh. He was a fair, bright-eyed boy with a little curled-up moustache which gave him the air of a cherub playfully disguised. “It is the county of mystery. Doesn’t your poet say: