LordPeter List Literary Contest

We watched her stand up from the table and walk into the lounge. It was a large lounge and the middle of the it had been cleared for dancing. There was an orchestra on a platform at one end of the lounge, for the dancing. There were little tables around the sides of the lounge, where we could drink coffee or liqueurs and watch the dancing.

She took her place at a little table on the side of the lounge and gave an order for coffee or for a liqueur. We could not hear her give her order. We watched the dancing. Two dancers were dancing the waltz. The man was tall and fair and his sleek hair was plastered to his head. His face was queer and white and unwholesome. He had a wide, melancholy, despondent mouth. The girl was wearing a dress of pink satin. The captain said that it was the color of petunias. Petunias do not grow here anymore, not since the war. The dress had a very large bustle and a long train, a train that was too long for the dancing. The girl leaned back in the man's arms as they danced to the music played by the orchestra. The orchestra played the "Blue Danube" waltz.

We looked at the women in the room. The women in the room wore dresses with long skirts and tight waists and low necks. Some of the women were wearing ostrich feathers. Some of them carried fans. We looked at the slender waists of the women. We said that yesterday, on the tennis-court, when the women all wore short, loose tunics to play tennis in, that the tunics had shown that their waists were the waists of muscular young women, modern young women, the waists of women who despised all bonds. Not of women like the women we had known in the cafes in the war.

We had thought that the women who wore the dresses were like the women we had known in the cafes in the war, but now we knew that after the dancing, these women would remove the dress and the train and the bustle. After the dancing, they would put on a dress with a short skirt and they would walk off, with a job to do and money in the pocket of the dress with the short skirt. Now we know that it is only a game. It is only a game, but we do not know the rules of the game.

We talked of the women we had known in the cafes in the war and we talked of the little death, and we talked of the bulls.

-- Miss Tarrant, a good Socialist

Parody of...

Back to the LordPeter Literary Contest page.