“No,” he replied at last. “That is—she never would tell me.”
He said it quite simply, gazing down at the proud white face on the bier with a hypnotic intensity of demand. It made my anger shrivel away into nothing. It made me shiver. I saw something dreadful in the smile just touching the dead woman’s lips—a smile of Leonardo that was what you chose. But to me it was less dreadful than the sighing admission of the man’s words. They somehow grew up monstrously before me in the candle-light of the little painted chapel. They painted for me a picture of pride more terrifying than anything I had conceived. Inscrutably they unlocked the tower into which I had never stepped, peopled the lonely castle, haunted that fairy aisle of cypresses. Inexorably they uncovered for me, behind the smiling mask of my own life, the ghosts of sorrow and defeat, forebodings blacker and more intolerable still.
The poignancy of that revelation choked me, blinded me. I staggered back into the dark, leaving Montughi to take what answer he could from the mute lips of his Princess.
THE BALD SPOT
“How’ll you have it, sir?” asked the barber: “Wet or dry?”
“It depends,” answered Jerry. “In politics I’m for the wet. In hair-cuts it’s dry for mine.”
He regarded the mirror not without complacency, studying the image which he there beheld of a young man about town and noting incidentally how much it improved the appearance of the same to be well cropped.
The barber, a cold man and an assured, met his eye in the glass:
“I’m with you in politics. But when it comes to hair-cuts I like a little brilliantine. Your hair seems to be getting a bit thin, too. How about an application of Pinaud?”
An application! Jerry shook a bored head. He knew them of old, these barbers, with their soaps, their singeings, their powders, their pastes, their variously perfumed waters, and their endless ingenuities for parting a customer and his money. The concluding rites of the occasion were conducted in a refined silence.