And he's big enough as it is. I must keep him quiet."
"But you can't keep the other men quiet. With your face and your voice--"
"Oh, it isn't the voice," she said with contempt.
He looked at her rather sadly.
"Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will
you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes
from something else?"
"What?"
"Your personality--your self."
"My soul!" she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning
expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. "Are we in the
prehistoric Eighties?"
"We are in the unchanging world."
"Unchanging! My dear boy!"
"Yes, unchanging," he repeated obstinately.
He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling
and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession
of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying
gently backwards and forwards.
"Well, Mr. Pierce, what's the matter?"
"Mr. Pierce!" he said, almost savagely.
"Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of
early Eighty yearns--"
"How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?" he
exclaimed, turning on her. "You say you care for nothing but the outside
of things--the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for
nothing else. Yet when you sing you--you--"
"What do I do?"
"It's as if another woman than you were singing in you--a woman totally
unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which you
care nothing about.
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