Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
"Very few male novelists can draw women well; Waugh is a towering exception."
Evelyn Waugh : The Height of His Powers
L.E. Sissman
The Atlantic
March, 1972
But not Julia, oh, not Lady Julia. She is one thing only, Renaissance tragedy. You know what she looks like. Who could help it? Her photograph appears as regularly in the illustrated papers as the advertisements for Beecham's Pills. A face of flawless Florentine Quattrocento beauty; almost anyone else with those looks would have been tempted to become artistic; not Lady Julia; she's as smart as -- well, as smart as Stefanie. Nothing greenery-yallery about her. So gay, so correct, so unaffected. Dogs and children love her, other girls love her -- my dear, she's a fiend -- a passionless, acquisitive, intriguing, ruthless filler. I wonder if she's incestuous. I doubt it; all she wants is power. There ought to be an Inquisition especially set up to burn her.
-Brideshead Revisited
He found Malt House without difficulty. It had been a brew house in the seventeenth century and later was converted to a private house. It had a large, regular front of dressed stone, facing the village green. The curtains and the china in the window proclaimed that it was in "good hands." Basil noted the china with approval - large, black Wedgewood urns - valuable and vulnerable and no doubt well-loved. When the door opened it disclosed a view straight through the house to a white lawn and a cedar tree laden with snow.''
The door was opened by a large and lovely girl. She had fair curly hair and a fair skin, huge, pale blue eyes, a large, shy mouth. She was dressed in a tweed suit and woolen jumper as though for country exercise, but the soft, fur-boots showed she was spending the morning at home. Everything about this girl was large and soft and round and ample. A dress shop might not have chosen her as a mannequin but she was not a fat girl; a more civilized age would have found her admirably proportioned; Boucher would have painted her half-clothed in a flutter of blue and pink draperies, a butterfly hovering over a breast of white and rose.
"Miss Prettyman-Partridge?"
"No. Please don't say you've come to sell something. It's terribly cold standing here and if I ask you in I shall have to buy it."
"I want to see Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge."
"They're dead. At least one is; the other sold us the house last summer. Is that all, please? I don't want to be rude but I must shut the door or freeze."
So that was what Barbara had heard about the Malt House. "May I come in?"
"Oh dear, said this splendid girl, leading him into the room with the Wedgeroom urns. "Is it something to buy or forms to fill in or just a subscription? If it's the first two I can't help because my husband's away with the yeomanry; if it's a subscription I've got some money upstairs. I've been told to give the same as Mrs. Andrews, the doctor's wife. If you haven't been to her yet, come back when you find what she's good for.
Everything in the room was new; that to say the paint was new and the carpets and the curtains, and the furniture had been newly put in position. There was a very large settee in front of the fireplace whose cushions, upholstered in toile-de-Jouy, still bore the impress of that fine young woman; she had been lying there when Basil rang the bell. He knew that if he put his hand in the round cavity where her hip had rested, it would still be warm; and that further cushion had been tucked under her arm. The book she had been reading was on the lambskin hearth-rug. Basil could reconstruct the position, exactly, where she had been sprawling with the langour of extreme youth.
-Put Out More Flags
Patum Peperium will be shuttered for a 2 week mid-winter break at the end of the business day Friday, February 15, 2008. We will re-open Tuesday March 4, 2008.
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