“I do; aside from that, though, I'm not sure; probably because you are so remote and cold.”
“Thank God!” she replied. “You haven't stopped to think where I'd be if I weren't. And yet, no one, in their work, is supposed to be more emotional. It's funny, and I don't pretend to understand. The trouble with me is that I have no life of my own: ever since I was sixteen I've done what directors told me, for the public; it is time I had some private feelings.”
“It must be a nuisance,” he agreed.
Another dance began, but neither of them stirred; from where Lee sat the long doors were panels of shifting colors and movement. The music beat, fluctuated, in erratic bars. A deep unhappiness possessed him, an appalling loneliness that sometimes descended on him in crowds. Even Fanny, the thought of his children, could not banish it. Above the drum he thought he could hear the sibilant dissatisfaction of the throng striving for an eternity of youth. The glass about the porch, blotted with night, was icy cold, but it was hot within; the steam pipes were heated to their full capacity, and the women's painted and powdered faces were streaked—their assumption of vitality and color was running from them.
“Hideous,” Mina Raff said with a small grimace. She had the strange ability of catching his unexpressed thoughts and putting them into words. “Women,” she went on, “spend all their money and half their lives trying to look well, and you'd suppose they would learn something, but they don't.”
“What do women dress for?” he demanded; “is it to make themselves seductive to men or to have other women admire and envy them?”
“Both,” she answered, “but mostly it's a sort of competition with men for the prize. I'll tell you something about us if you like—we are not made of sugar and spice and other pleasant bits, but only of two: prostitute and mother. Not, of course, separately, or in equal parts; some of us have more of one, others more of the other. That girl across the table from you is all prostitute, the married woman you were talking to is both, quite evenly divided; your wife is a mother, even with her remarkable eyes.” She stopped his obvious inquiry:
“I am an artist, and no one has yet discovered what that is. Do you remember the straw you used to get with a glass of soda water? You see, often I think I'm like that, a thing for bright colors to pour through. It's very discouraging. There is Peyton, and he'll want to dance.” She rose, slipping out of her cloak.
Lee Randon saw Fanny not far away, and he dropped into a chair beside her. “Well,” he asked, “how is it going?”
“It seems all right,” she told him, with one of her engaging smiles. “I was surprised that you talked so long to Mina Raff; I had the idea you didn't like her.” Women, he reflected, were uncanny. “Three women are just plastered up in the dressing-room,” she continued; “Sophie Tane ruined her dress completely, and Crystal Willard has been sobbing for an hour. Lee, there are horrid bruises on her arm—do you think he is brutal?”