"You had a visitor."
"It was only your admirer Menheperra. Was that why you did not come in?"
"Yes, it was."
"Ah, you wild creature! ... Come here, Ruru," he called to the cat, "You have had enough of it?" he asked Dio.
"No, I don't mind," Dio said politely, but she would gladly have thrust the clinging creature away.
"It is marvellous," he said, smiling and looking at her in the peculiar masculine way she hated: 'just like spiders crawling about one's naked body,' she used to say about these looks. "One cannot get used to you, Dio! Each time I see you I cannot help marvelling at your beauty.... There, forgive me, I know you don't like it!"
The cat lifted its face and looked straight into Dio's eyes with its fiery pupils. She pushed it slightly away with her foot, afraid that the cat might jump on to her lap.
"Come now, you are being a nuisance!" Tuta laughed, seized the cat by its collar and, dragging it on to the couch, made it lie down, spanked it and said "Sleep!"
"Well, how do matters stand? Are you coming?" he began in a different and business-like voice. "Stop, wait, don't answer at once. I am not hurrying you, but just think: what are you doing here, what are you waiting for? Learning our dances? What for? Dance in your own way—they will like it all the better. Foreign things are more fashionable with us nowadays than our own...."
"I have decided..."