"I mean—will you show yourself with us? We will give you no words. It will be quite easy. What money we make we divide among us. All you shall do shall be to stand and be looked at—you are beautiful, and you know it, no doubt?"
She made a weary sign of assent. Beautiful? What could it matter if she were so, or if she were not, what the mere thought of it? The beauty that she owned, though so late a precious possession, a crown of glory to her, had lost all its fairness and all its wonder since it had been strengthless to bind to hers the only heart in which she cared to rouse a throb of passion, since it had been unworthy to draw upon it with any lingering gaze of love the eyes of Arslàn.
He looked at her more closely; this was a strange creature, he thought, who, being a woman and in her first youth, could thus acknowledge her own loveliness with so much candor, yet so much indifference.
That afternoon they halted at a little town that stood in a dell across the fields, a small place lying close about a great church tower.
It was almost dusk when they entered it; but it was all alive with lights and shows, and trumpets and banners; it was the day of a great fair, and the merry-go-rounds were whirling, and the trades in gilded cakes and puppets of sugar were thriving fast, and the narrow streets were full of a happy and noisy peasant crowd.
As soon as the little troop entered the first street a glad cry rose.
They were well known and well liked there; the people clustered by dozens round them, the women greeting them with kisses, the children hugging the dogs, the men clamoring with invitations to eat and to drink and be merry.
They bade her watch them at their art in a rough wooden house outside the wine tavern.
She stood in the shadow and looked as they bade her, while the mimic life of their little stage began and lived its hour.
To the mind which had received its first instincts of art from the cold, lofty, passionless creations of Arslàn, from the classic purity and from the divine conception of the old Hellenic ideal, the art of the stage could seem but poor and idle mimicry; gaudy and fragrantless as any painted rose of paper blooming on a tinseled stem.