‘The first this year

‘The first this year,’ they said. ‘Where do you get them?’
‘Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her.’ When the eggs were gone and we were eating the lobster Newburg, the last guest arrived.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t get away before. I was lunching with my p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it ‘was very odd my leaving when I did. I told him I had to change for F-f-footer.’
He was tall, slim, rather swarthy, with large saucy eyes. The rest of us wore rough tweeds and brogues,mont blanc pens. He had on a smooth chocolate-brown suit with loud white stripes, suède shoes, a large bow-tie and he drew off yellow, wash-leather gloves as he came into the room; part Gallic, part Yankee, part, perhaps Jew; wholly exotic. This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the ‘aesthete’ par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville. He had been pointed out to me often in the streets, as he pranced along with his high peacock tread; I had heard his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him, under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously. After luncheon he stood on, the balcony with a megaphone which had appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian’s room, and in languishing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.
‘I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,’ he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches;
‘Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the 1-1-lowest of the dead...’

And then,Discount UGG Boots, stepping lightly into the room, ‘How I have surprised them! All b-boatmen are Grace Darlings to me. ‘
We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the Etonians sang: ‘Home they brought her warrior dead’ to his own accompaniment on the harmonium.
It was four o’clock before we broke up.
Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion,’ and to me: ‘I think it’s perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.’
The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian said: ‘Have some more Cointreau,’ so I stayed and later he said, ‘I must go to the Botanical Gardens.’ ‘Why? ‘
‘To see the ivy.’
It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.
‘I’ve never been to the Botanical Gardens,’ I said.
‘Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There’s a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don’t know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.’
When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had left them that morning,Moncler outlet online store, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be real. Was it the screen,Fake Designer Handbags? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.