Page:The beautiful and damned.djvu/86

 the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea....

Then the illusion snapped like a nest of threads; the room grouped itself around him, voices, faces, movement; the garish shimmer of the lights overhead became real, became portentous; breath began, the slow respiration that she and he took in time with this docile hundred, the rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meaningless play and interplay and tossing and reiterating of word and phrase—all these wrenched his senses open to the suffocating pressure of life—and then her voice came at him, cool as the suspended dream he had left behind.

"I belong here," she murmured, "I'm like these people."

For an instant this seemed a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her entrancement had increased—her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year's mellowest fox-trot:

"Something—goes Ring-a-ting-a-ling-a-ling Right in-your ear—"

Again she spoke, from the centre of this pervasive illusion of her own. It amazed him. It was like blasphemy from the mouth of a child.

"I'm like they are—like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the music of that orchestra."

"You're a young idiot!" he insisted wildly. She shook her blond head.

"No, I'm not. I am like them.... You ought to see.... You don't know me." She hesitated and her eyes came back to him, rested abruptly on his, as