I always use citronella for mosquitoes in the country.
They were still pretending when I got back, all of them, and Aurelia was saying: "Citronella differs psychologically from Juliet—she is more like poor, dear Francesca in her feeling of the cosmic inevitability of tragedy. But Stegomyia had a strain of Hamlet in him."
"Yes, a strain of Hamlet," said Voke Easeley. "A strain of Hamlet in his nature, Aurelia—and more than a strain of Tristram!"
"It is a thing that Maeterlinck should have written, in his earlier manner," said Mrs. Voke Easeley.
"The story has its Irish counterpart, too," said Leila Brown, who rather specializes, you know, on all those lovely Lady Gregory things. "I have always wondered why Yeats or Synge hasn't used it."
"The essential story is older than Ireland," said the Swami. "It is older than Buddha. There are three versions of it in Sanskrit, and the young men sing it to this day in Benares."
Affectation! Affectation! Oh, how I abhor affectation!
It was perfectly horrid of Fothy just the same.
Anyone might have been fooled.
I might have been myself, if I were not too intellectually honest, and Fothy hadn't tipped me the wink.
[103]
