Twilight Sleep
ing to create a work of art? I thought in America you made so much of creativeness—constructiveness—what do you call it? Is it less creative to turn a film than to manufacture bathtubs? Can there be a nobler mission than to teach history to the millions by means of beautiful pictures? . . . Yes! I see Lita listening, and I know she agrees with me. . . Lita! What a Lucrezia for his Cæsar! But why look shocked, dear Dexter? Of course you know that Lucrezia Borgia has been entirely rehabilitated? I saw that also in 'Vogue.' She was a perfectly pure woman—and her hair was exactly the colour of Lita's."
They were finishing coffee in the drawing-room, the doors standing open into the tall library where the men always smoked—the library which (as Stanley Heuston had once remarked) Pauline's incorruptible honesty had actually caused her to fill with books.
"Oh, what is it? Not a fire? . . . A chimney in the house? . . . But it's actually here. . . Not a. . ."
The women, a-flutter at the sudden siren-shriek, the hooting, rushing and clattering up the drive, surged across the parquet, flowed with startled little cries out into the hall, and saw the unsurprisable Powder signalling to two perfectly matched footmen to throw open the double doors.
"A fire? The engine . . . the . . . oh, it's a fire-drill! A parade! How realistic! How
