THE CICERONE
she found the Venetian men, but the heiress only stared at him coldly
and asked what he took her for.
Miss Grabbe was aware of her legend; it half-pleased her, and
yet she resented it, for, at bottom, she was naively unconscious of the
plain purport of her acts. She imagined that she came abroad out of
a cultural impatience with
America~
in her own eyes, she was always
a rebel against a commercial civilization. She hoped to be remembered
for her architectural experiments, her patronage of the arts, her
championship of personal freedom, and flattered herself that in
Europe this side of her was taken seriously. Men in America, she
complained, thought only about business, and the European practice
of making a business of love seemed to her, in contrast, the mark of
an advanced civilization. Sexual intercourse, someone had taught her,
was a quick transaction with the beautiful, and she proceeded to make
love, whenever she traveled, as ingenuously as she trotted into a cathe–
dral: men were a continental commodity of which one naturally took
advantage, along with the wine and the olives, the bitter coffee and
the crusty bread. Miss Grabbe, despite her boldness, was not an origi–
nal woman, and her boldness, in fact, consisted in taking everything
literally. She made love in Europe because it was the thing to do, be–
cause European lovers were superior to American lovers ("My dear,"
she told the young lady, "there's all the difference in the
world- it's
like comparing the very best California claret to the simplest little
vin du pays"),
because she believed it was good for her, especially in
hot climates, and because one was said to learn languages a great deal
more readily in bed. The rapid turnover of her lovers did not particu–
larly disconcert her; she took a quantitative view and sought for a
wealth
of sensations. She liked to startle and to shock, yet positively
did not understand why people considered her immoral. A prehen–
sile approach, she inferred, was laudable where values were in ques–
tion-what was the beautiful
for,
if not to be seized and savored?
For Polly Grabbe, as for the big luxury liners and the small
school
t~achers
with their yearly piety of Europe, the war had been
an enforced hiatus. Though she had wished for the defeat of Hitler
and been generous with money to
his
victims, in her heart she had
waited for it to be over with a purely personal impatience. She was
among the first to return when t:avel was once again permitted, an
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