Free Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay

indeed, there were, specifically, any such creatures as women. . . . For Imogen was born to have a doubtful mind, on this as on other subjects. She might almost have been called mentally defective in some directions, of so little was she ever to be sure.
    “Stanley,” pronounced Vicky, “has more Zeitgeist ”(for that unpleasant word had of late come in) “than any one I ever met.”

1
Rome
     
    The threshold of the nineties. Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border. The nineties, we say, were gay, tired,
fin-de-siècle
, witty, dilettante, decadent, yellow, and Max Beerbohm was their prophet; or they were noisy, imperial, patriotic, militant, crude, and Kipling was their prophet. And, indeed, you may find attributes to differentiate any period from any other. What people wrote of the nineties at the time was that they were modern, which, of course, at the time they were; that they were hustling. . . . (“In these days of hurry and rapid motion, when there is so little time to rest and reflect,” as people say in sermons and elsewhere, as if the greater rapidity of motion did not give one more time to rest and reflect, since one the sooner arrives at one’s destination); that they were noisy; that literary output was enormous; that (alternatively) the new writers were very good, or that the good writers had gone from among us. One knows the kind of thing; all discourses on contemporary periods have been full of it, from the earliest times even unto these last.
    Rome was thirty-one. She was of middle height, a slight, pale, delicate young woman, with ironic blue-green eyes and mocking lips a little compressed at thecorners, and a pointed kind of face, and fair, silky hair, which she wore no longer short, but swept gracefully up and back from her small head, defining its shape and showing the fine line from nape to crown. She was a woman of the world, a known diner out, a good talker, something of a wit, so that her presence was sought by hostesses as that of an amusing bachelor is sought. She had elegance, distinction, brain, a light and cool touch on the topics of her world, a calm, mocking, sceptical detachment, a fastidious taste in letters and in persons. She knew her way about, as the phrase goes, and could be relied on to be socially adequate, in spite of a dangerous distaste for fools, and in spite of the “dancing and destructive eye ”(to use a phrase long afterwards applied to one whose mentality perhaps a little resembled hers) which she turned on all aspects of the life around her. People called her intensely modern—whatever that might mean. In 1890 it presumably meant that you would have been surprised to find her type in 1880. But as a matter of fact, you would not, had you been endowed with a little perspicacity, been in the least surprised; you would have found it, had you looked, all down the ages (though always as a rare growth). In 1790, 1690, 1590, and back through every decade of every century, there have been Rome Gardens, fastidious,
mondaine
, urbane, lettered, critical, amused, sceptical, and what was called in 1890
fin-de-siécle
. It is not a type which, so to speak, makes the world go round; it does not assist movements nor join in crusades; it coolly distrusts enthusiasm and eschews the heat and ardour of the day. It is to be found among both sexes equally, and is the stuff of which the urbane bachelor and spinster, rather than the spouse and parent, are made. For mating and producing (as a career, not as an occasional encounter) are apt to destroy the type, by forcing itto too continuous and ardent intercourse with life; that graceful and dilettante aloofness can scarcely survive such prolonged heat. To be cool, sceptical and passionate at