Gloria - 1

The leader of the flabbergasts took Sophia's hand, cutting her through for a slow minute with his eyes and begged her to 'give herself' to him. Skilfully manipulating a sensation among his dark disciples-- Gloria being the woman he had been invited to admire-- he would have renounced Venus to hold his movement together and he suspected she had already made her nit.

Gloria, holding her gold-swathed, rather wooden looking head erect as a capitol, superbly confronted him, taking his measure.

"Is she not magnificent?" the men inquired in chorus.

"Hmmm," Brontoknave addressed her, "You and I!! Our natures, as I see, are identical."

He turned to Sophia, bracing himself for the intuitive intellectual attack-- with a sharp turn about race as he sat down beside her, holding a silken ankle to his knee with an indefinable air of indiscreet personal approach.

"Each one of us," he declaimed, "Has a cemetery within ourselves-- that cemetery must be reduced to a minimum-- a minimum.

Gloria - 2

"Ban," he exclaimed, "What's the use of talking to you
with the mists of romanticism rising in your eyes?"

"Oh," said Sophia, "I understand all you say-- but I
can't make out where you're going."

She had tired the flabbergast tinder-- his satellites
flared.

"We're not such cowards as to ask where we're going--
we're brave enough to go!"

"You should see me," roared Brontolivido, "in a vermil-
lion car-- exceeding the speed limit-- no lamps-- no mudguards--
paroxysmally into ditches. That is the Flabbergasts' way of life."

His remarks fell like bombs upon her inadjustable mind.

"Let me see," he was shouting as if his dictatorial
depended on ALLXXX attaching the other men to him with chains of
his female conquests, "I once had a Russian-- No," snapping his
fingers memory fetching, "It was an Irish woman-- she was
unutterably sensual-- of a sensuality --," his bald head glistened
with souvenirs, "She didn't care a damn for my literature--."

Gloria - 3

3

"As for you Americans--," he called across to Gloria, "There was a New York woman on the boat-- One of the-- I dare say you know her--."

"No you don't," cried Sophia, "It's not *gone*-- if you must bawl about them, you're going to omit their names."

Gloria painted some dynamic pictures over the week-end, a decided acquisition for the movement. Foreign-- beautiful-- youthful, she got the publicity she was so fitted for. The flabbergasts congregated frequently in her studio every celebrity of the new intelligentzia when passing through-- they brought up there. At last, even Joannes, so renowned, so aloof, appeared. His restless silence in that uproar a volcano dormant among the petty explosions of a loosely cast dynamite.

Sophia could never remember how they became acquainted-- they must have spoken, yet it seemed as if they had not-- so little external impression did he make on her. It was a year since she had come to a one-sided intimacy with him-- when he had passed her like a tramping prisoner between close grey walls with an airy ripple of the *demi* olives feathering above them. He

Gloria - 4

had descended the hill as if his eyes still stared from its summit
at something recessive, holding a silvered branch in the same list-
less manner as his cup or tea long ago-- It was in some way to
Sophia as if she had passed her own self. She did not notice how
they came together or how they got away. It was as if nothing--
nothing in their tangible life had led up to it when, they round
themselves alone clinging beseechingly to one another in a forlorn
relief. All alone, sitting on a table in such isolation the red
tiles of the floor, having thrown them up, spread out around them
an ocean of becalmed sectagonals.