Creativity Quote by Peter Scott

The line lands with the casual bluntness of someone reporting a social fact that still feels faintly unreal. Scott isn’t moralizing; he’s sketching a scene like an artist would, by blocking: entrance, split, disappearance. The choreography is the point. One doorway becomes a border, and the party stops being a shared space and turns into two parallel events running on the same clock.

The subtext is in that small, telling “we.” It implies a visiting group - likely British, likely mixed - suddenly reorganized by someone else’s rules. “That was the last that we’d see of them” carries a bemused, slightly edged astonishment: not only are the genders separated, but social intimacy is rationed, managed, withheld. The phrase “until we were coming home” makes the separation feel total, not a momentary custom but the defining experience of the night.

Context matters: Scott, a mid-century British artist and establishment figure, is speaking from within a post-imperial moment when “foreign” customs were often described with a mix of curiosity and inherited authority. He frames the Pakistani party through spatial segregation because that’s what reads most legibly as difference to him - and because it quietly flatters the narrator’s own norm as the unspoken baseline. The quote works because it reveals two things at once: a genuine encounter with a distinct social code, and the observer’s reflex to translate that code into absence. The women aren’t depicted as present people; they’re rendered as a vanishing point.