Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/254

 His tone of solicitousness annoyed her. "Not at all," she said contrarily. She threw her long black cape over her freezing shoulders, hoping he would sense it was a signal she wanted to leave with him now, and tried wildly to think of something impersonal to say to carry them back to safety. But she could think of nothing but the image which had been corroding her spirit from the second she had heard his laugh during her song, seeing him sitting at the table illuminated by the golden hair of the girl next to him. To keep her fingers still she began to draw on her long white kid gloves.

"Do you know," she began, as though struggling to keep conversation flowing with an unresponsive dinner partner, "that when I sing, though I do not hold my eyes open, nothing escapes me? I see everything. I can tell you what everyone in that room was doing. For example, a waiter took a drink behind the maître d'hôtel's back. A girl in black and silver combed her hair at the table. Quelle elegance!"

She stopped abruptly and paused, and his impulse to smile at the derisive afterthought died for, in the mirror, he saw over her back the black cape as a kind of Nemesis mesmerizing her inexorably to self-destruction.

"But you!" she resumed, speaking as though the words were being pulled out of her, her body swaying back and forward under the burden of repeating a message from someone she could not bear. "I never thought you would be so graceless, and unkind, as to bring your mistress to my performance and, with her, to laugh at me."

She looked at him wild-eyed, and his expression of bewilderment made her feel even more terrified of the malignant demon within her that made her say the words. Mother of God, save me! she thought. Make him strike me so I can fall and hide my head in shame.

With an eerie scream she turned into the enveloping folds of the cape and, for a second, he thought she had collapsed onto the dressing table; then he saw that the violent movement of her arms was a searching in her bag for the drug which could be her only release. Mounds of flowers gave off a suffocating funereal odor and he saw her wrap herself in the black shroud in which the only live thing was her shaking white-gloved hand scratching a match on the wall to light a cigarette dangling from her smeared red lips. It missed its mark and he leapt forward, scorching his hand on her burning forehead, while from her came little cries which might earlier have been those of love. 242