“But––good heavens!––isn’t there any other anatomical feature to that block of marble?”
“I explained that he is a concentrationist. His school believes in concentrating on a single feature only, and in rendering that feature as minutely and perfectly as possible.”
Jim said: “He looks as sane as a broker, too. You never can tell, can you, sweetness?”
He glanced at several other people whose features were not familiar, but Palla’s explanations of her friends had slightly discouraged him and he made no further inquiries.
Vanya Tchernov was there, dreamy and sweet-mannered; Estridge sat by Ilse, looking a trifle careworn, as though hospital work were taking it out of him. Marya Lanois was there, too, with her slightly slanting green eyes and her tiger-red hair––attracting from him a curious sort of stealthy admiration, inexplicable to him because he knew he was so entirely in love with Palla.
A woman of forty sat on his right––he promptly 211 forgot her name each time he heard it––who ate fastidiously and chose birth-control as the subject for conversation. And he dodged it in vain, for her conversation had become a monologue, and he sat fiddling with his food, very red, while the silky voice, so agreeable in pitch and intonation, slid smoothly on.
Afterward Palla explained that she was a celebrated sociologist, but Jim remained shy of her.
Other people came in after dinner. Vanya seated himself at the piano and played from one of his unpublished scores. Ilse sang two Scandinavian songs in her fresh, wholesome, melodious voice––the song called Ygdrasil, and the Song of Thokk. Wardner had brought a violin, and he and Vanya accompanied Marya’s Asiatic songs, but with some difficulty on the sculptor’s part, as modern instruments are scarcely adapted to the sort of Russian music she chose to sing.
Marya had a way, when singing, which appeared almost insolent. Seated, or carelessly erect, her supple figure fell into lines of indolently provocative grace; and the warm, golden notes welling from her throat seemed to be flung broadcast and indifferently to her listeners, as alms are often flung, without interest, toward abstract poverty and not to the poor breathing thing at one’s elbow.
She sang, in her preoccupied way, one of her savage, pentatonic songs, more Mongol than Cossack; then she sang an impudent burlatskiya lazily defiant of her listeners; then a so-called “dancing song,” in which there was little restraint in word or air.