“But not to a child,” Mina Raff protested, with what, in her, was animation and color; “it has a wicked, irresistible beauty.” She gazed with a sudden flash of penetration at Lee Randon. “Are you sure it's your daughter's?” she asked, once more repressed, negative. “Are you quite certain it is not yours and you are in love with it?”
He laughed uncomfortably. “You seem to think I'm insane—”
“No,” she replied, “but you might, perhaps, be about that.” Her voice was as impersonal as an oracle's. “You would be better off without her in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be half as dangerous. How blind women are—your wife would keep that about and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. What did you call her?”
“Cytherea.”
“I don't know what that means.”
He told her, and she studied him in a brief masked appraisal. “Do you know,” she went on, “that I get four hundred letters a week from men; they are put everywhere, sometimes in my bed; and last week a man killed himself because I wouldn't see him. You'd think that he had all a man wanted from life; yet, in his library, with his secretary waiting for him, he.... Why?” she demanded, questioning him with her subdued magic.
“Have you ever cared for any of them?” he asked indirectly.
“I'm not sure,” she replied, with an evident honesty; “I am trying to make up my mind now. But I hope not, it will bring so much trouble. I do all I can to avoid that; I really hate to hurt people. If it happens, though, what can you do? Which is worse—to damage others or yourself? Of course, underneath I am entirely selfish; I have to be; I always was. Art is the most exhausting thing that is. But I don't know a great deal about it; other people, who act rather badly, can explain so fully.”
From where Lee sat he could see Cytherea; the unsteady light fell on the gilt headdress, the black hair and the pale disturbing smile. She seemed to have paused in a slow graceful walk, waiting, with that wisdom at once satirical and tender, for him. Together, slowly, deliberately, they would move away from the known, the commonplace, the bound, into the unknown—dark gardens and white marble and the murmur of an ultramarine sea. He was rudely disturbed by the entrance of Anette and Peyton Morris. “We're so sorry,” Anette said in an exaggerated air of apology; “come on away, Peyton.” But the latter told Lee that Fanny was looking for him. “We are ready to go over to the Club; it's ten minutes past eight.”
Mina Raff gazed up at the doll. “I have an idea the devil made you,” she declared.