Her fascination, quite apart from her beauty, lay in the fact that she was so ravishingly feminine. To be a woman was her proud profession—and in this again she was Asiatic. What hours she must have spent over pampering her body! She was sleek and groomed as a race-horse. Physically she was the last word in feminine perfection. Her string of pearls was worth more than most men earn in a lifetime. Her sables represented the year's income of a millionaire. There was no item of her attire that was not sumptuous and that had not been acquired regardless of expense. To have achieved her luxuriance of beauty must have dissipated a fortune. Whose fortune? Surely, not hers!
His mind was haunted by misgivings as he watched her. He had so nearly allowed himself to care for her. It was only her lightness and willful inconsiderateness that had prevented. But now that he had been prevented, her employment of his Christian name struck him as singularly inappropriate. It made him suspect a trap. It put him in a mood to interpret any tenderness on her part as strategy, as a signal that something was wanted.
While he eyed her in silence, she drew nearer and leaned across the rail. Her shoulder pressed him. He was aware of the tingling sensation of her warmth, like a little hand caressing. He caught her fragrance, secret and somnolent as the magic of hidden rose-gardens in Damascus.
She spoke. Her voice was deep and foreign; it seemed too deep to be pent in so slight a body. It was harsh in many of its tones, as though there had been times when it had been parched with thirst. It conjured visions of caravans creeping across molten deserts. It was hypnotic, barbaric. In listening to it, he lost sight of the exquisite sophistication of her appearance. His imagination reclothed her, loosening her hair, veiling her face, shrouding her in a robe of gold and saffron, slipping sandals on her feet and making her ankles tinkle with many bangles.
“You don't like me any more. Is it not so?” she questioned softly. “My master is offended.”
He shook himself irritably, as though he were flinging off the yoke of her attraction. “I'm not offended. I was thinking.”
“About what?”
“Prince Rogovich.”
“And why should my master be thinking of Prince Rogovich?”
He leaned still further across the rail in an instinctive effort to avoid her. There was seduction in the feigned humility with which she addressed him, as though he were a Pasha and she a slave-girl.