Eva answered: “The world is big and youth is brief. Beauty yearns toward me, exists for me, and droops when I am gone. Since Ignifer is mine, my hunger seems insatiable. It is radiant over my earth, and makes all my paths easy. You see, dear, what you have done.”
“Beware of Ignifer,” said Christian, with that same, apparently secretive smile.
Eva’s lids drooped heavily. “Fyodor Szilaghin has arrived,” she said.
“There are so many,” Christian answered, “I can’t possibly know them all.”
“You see none, but they all see you,” said Eva. “They all wonder at you and ask: Who is that slender, distinguished man with very white teeth and blue eyes? Do you not hear their whispering? They make me vain of you.”
“What do they know of me? Let them be.”
“Women grow pale when you approach. Yesterday on the promenade there was a flower-seller, a Flemish girl. She looked after you, and then she began to sing. Did you not hear?”
“No. What was the song she sang?”
Eva covered her eyes with her hands, and sang softly and with an expression on her lips that was half pain and half archness: