“Unchanging! My dear boy!”
“Yes, unchanging,” he repeated obstinately.
He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying gently backwards and forwards.
“Well, Mr. Pierce, what’s the matter?”
“Mr. Pierce!” he said, almost savagely.
“Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of early Eighty yearns—”
“How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?” he exclaimed, turning on her. “You say you care for nothing but the outside of things—the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for nothing else. Yet when you sing you—you—”
“What do I do?”
“It’s as if another woman than you were singing in you—a woman totally unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which you care nothing about.”
“The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis,” she said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. “If this”—she touched her face—“were to be changed into—shall we say a Filberte countenance?”