“Because I am plain and nobody asked me to,” she answered.
He looked at her. They had known each other for some time, but he had never studied her features. She was exquisitely dressed, and in her eyes lay an expression of infinite pain, the pain of despair and vain revolt against the injustice of nature; he felt a lively sympathy for her.
“I, too, am scorned by everybody,” he said. “All the rights belong to the officers. Whenever it is a question of natural selection, right is on the side of the strong and the beautiful. Look at their shoulders and epaulettes....”
“How can you talk like that!”
“I beg your pardon! To have to play a losing game makes a man bitter! Will you give me a dance?”
“For pity’s sake?”
“Yes! Out of compassion for me!”
He threw away his cigar.
“Have you ever known what it means to be marked by the hand of fate, and rejected? To be always the last?” he began again, passionately.
“I have known all that! But the last do not always remain the last,” she added, emphatically. “There are other qualities, besides beauty, which count.”