When we began dancing, I was still fiddling in my mind with fragments of the dinner monologue. A couple of things should be said about it.
As the reader has perceived, it represented in its way a conscious effort at self-assessment. It was a partial statement of philosophy—my own—urged upon me at that time because, under my circumstances, some review of philosophy was inevitable. When the Ghoul appears, one thinks about one's thoughts.
For a while, we scarcely talked at all.
American women, as a rule, will rarely listen to a monologue by a man; when they do, it is usually because they want something from the man. Men have, generally, the better faculty for speech; in America they are not trained to use it. And they are, moreover, so accustomed to female authority in their formative years that they submit, all their lives, to the clamor of it. An aggregation of American people is thus conventionally dominated by the tongues of women and sounds like the continuous breaking of dishes.
Yvonne had listened through part of a lunch and all of a dinner and now we set our communication in a more definite language—one that followed the tempo of maracas and made use of the whole body.
"Rol," she said once, during an Afro-Cuban number, "needs lessons."
"Who doesn't?"
"Did you take a lot?"
"Hundreds."
She danced quietly for a while. "Did they teach you—?"