The Wicked Pavilion

by Dawn Powell

In the great libraries professors studied ways of doing away with books;

Philippe gave this question some judicious thought. “They come because they have always come here,” he said. “Why did they come here the first time, then?” “Nobody ever comes to the Julien for the first time,” Philippe said, and as this was a thought that appealed to him hugely, his plump little body shook with noiseless chuckles.

“What have you done with your fifty years, Dalzell Sloane?” he could answer, “I have failed in love and in art, but I have raised a beard.”

Marius is my dear friend, Ben must have said just as Dalzell had, and he is a fine painter, but what has he got that I haven’t got except a coffin? The feeling had lasted with Dalzell for days after the first funeral fanfare in the papers, a perfectly ridiculous resentment at Marius for “selling out,” quite as if he had started toadying to patrons and critics, dropping his old friends merely for the publicity and success of death.

Like shipboard acquaintances they confided freely everything about themselves except what they did last night or were going to do tomorrow.

The simple truth was that with her increasingly extravagant tastes she really could not afford to work.

Hadn’t he refrained from making any passes at her? Wasn’t that how you knew a man had seriously fallen for you?

How could he eulogize his sister’s classic candor until it was conveniently silenced once and for all?

It was wonderful to have fear and loneliness transformed at last into a great joke between friends.

“I am enthusiastically egotistical,” Dalzell interrupted hotly, “or else abysmally suicidal. I pride myself most on a kind of oafish stubbornness that gets me from one state to the other.”

Everyone was filled with the Christian pleasure of giving full praise to a man without requiring police protection from him.

Their disappointment in each other was the familiar discovery of age: the old friend of his youth has failed him because he fails to give him back his youth.