“Nothing. I just asked. Masculine frivolity, if you like.”
“I don’t like,” she retorted at once. “It is not the time to be frivolous. What are you flinging your very heart against? Or, perhaps, you are only playing a part.”
Razumov had felt that woman’s observation of him like a physical contact, like a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At that moment he received the mysterious impression of her having made up her mind for a closer grip. He stiffened himself inwardly to bear it without betraying himself.
“Playing a Part,” he repeated, presenting to her an unmoved profile. “It must be done very badly since you see through the assumption.”
She watched him, her forehead drawn into perpendicular folds, the thin black eyebrows diverging upwards like the antennae of an insect. He added hardly audibly—
“You are mistaken. I am doing it no more than the rest of us.”
“Who is doing it?” she snapped out.
“Who? Everybody,” he said impatiently. “You are a materialist, aren’t you?”
“Eh! My dear soul, I have outlived all that nonsense.”
“But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: ‘Man is a digestive tube.’ I imagine now....”