They went out together, presently.
"I have only got till lunch-time," warned the actress. "Matinee at two. Performance again at 8.30. A dog's life!"
"You wouldn't change with me!"
"Holy snakes! I would not!" Her vehemence startled, for the moment, in one so remotely calm. She pulled herself together as quickly. "No, I am fitted for my job. Some day I shall be the Big Noise all right."
Muriel glanced at the sure, emotionless face. Not pretty; La Gioconda, refined and Semiticized—if one might use the word. Beautifully tinted eyes, heavy lidded and calculating, not for gain, but as if their owner were perpetually weighing up the world and did not, like Brillianna Trefusis, find it at all amusing.
That Twinkle's distrait attitude at Marshall's silk-stocking counter was due to Muriel's own looming future the latter never guessed.
"I've seen 'em"—so ran the thoughts of the Jewess—"always devoid of natural feeling at the start, but unable to live without a man's eye upon them. The market value of passion glibly at the tongue's end. Never sentimentally eroto-maniacal; better if they were. Then, suddenly, the day when the craving for admiration merges into sex-realization. No actual desire perhaps, for the love of an individual: no realization of Love in the abstract as a desirable thing. A sudden startled awakening and, with neither religion nor moral sense behind.... If one could warn ... but there is always the chance that I am misreading her and am utterly in the wrong. She's no 'modern' product anyhow."
"Musings without method," remarked Muriel, having lingered to reduce the youth at the ribbon-counter to a state of drivelling imbecility with her smile: "Are you meditating upon some subtle gesture for your great act that will bring the curtain down in a storm of sobs more soul-satisfying than applause?"
"I was simply letting my mind run wild on the subject of heredity as a factor in folks' lives. There are few things admitted heredity now except those which are sexual, and I was wondering how far the psycho-analysts had really got going on that subject, apart from the sex-chart. One has heard of hypnotism as a cure at early stages for ... some things."
"If I went to a hypnotist to be cured of anything," said Muriel, "what's the betting the gentleman in the chair would find the positions reversed and himself masquerading as victim?"