The Apes of God (1930), Wyndham Lewis's ‘delayed time-bomb’ aimed at the ‘gilded Bohemia’ of Bloomsburies and Sitwells (Meyers 1980: 160), opens with a characteristically absurd prologue, a lengthy description of ‘The Toilette of a Veteran Gossip-Star’, during which a lady's maid is engaged in the sacred ritual of adorning her mistress's head with an ornate lace cap appropriate to a lady's standing. The prologue is written in satire of the modernist's (post-Jamesian/post-Bergsonian) ‘internalist’ method, conveying the ‘thought-stream’ of Lady Fredigonde's isolated and decrepit mind, whose preoccupation is the passage of time and approaching death, ‘the big ruthless question: What would be the last thing alive in that room?’ (Lewis 1987: 98; Lewis 1965: 22). In mocking travesty of familiar Woolfian preoccupations and styles the reader is made to follow the stream of consciousness, the flux taking us from the Lady's characteristic answer to the ontological puzzle she has set herself – ‘Beyond all doubt things, not PERSONS’ – followed by a mental note to herself to bequeath her collection of lace caps to the appropriate museum (‘Let her by all means survive as a cap – there were worse things than that, by Jupiter’), and finally, lace caps flashing upon the screen of her mind, the contemplation of a less than flattering future scenario: her head-dresses in their glass cases in the museum ‘examined by the hundred bloodshot eyes of a Red Sunday-School’; ‘little jumping bolsheviks’ smashing the glass of the show-cases and heading off with the caps, each neatly adjusted to a cropped bolshevik skull (Lewis 1965: 24–5).