Desirée turned her pale eyes on him. "I can dance better," she said, and before he had realized it, she was up and in the centre of the room, and everybody laughed and clapped hands, as Desirée began to dance with stealthy, cat-like steps. Her face was impudent, as she twined and twisted her thin body into contortions that set all the men leering at her. It was frankly repulsive and horrible to Humphrey; she seemed suddenly to have ceased to be a woman, just as when she had started to eat. She was inhuman when she sang and ate and danced.
The blur of white flesh through the smoke, the odour of heavy scents, and the sight of Desirée writhing in her horrid dance, sickened him. He saw her white teeth gleaming between her lips, half-parted with the exhaustion of her dance, he saw her eyes laughing at him, as though she were proud and expected his applause, and he felt a profound, inexplicable pity for her that overwhelmed his disgust.
She flung herself, panting, into her seat, and pushed back her disordered yellow hair with her hands. "Oh la! ... la!" she cried, laughing in gasps, "c'est fatiguant, ça ... my throat is like a furnace." And she clicked her glass against the glass that Humphrey held in his hand, and drained it to the finish.
"Why did you do that?" asked Humphrey, huskily.
"Do what?"
"Dance like that—in front of all these people?"
"Why shouldn't I, if I want to?"
"I don't like it," he said, wondering why he was impelled to say so.
"Well, you shouldn't have said she dances well," Desirée replied.
"I must be going," Humphrey said.