'I may be a fool, but no woman is completely a fool who has realised the depths of man's vanity.'
Julie Lafarge, who was always given to understand that one day she would marry the insolent Alexander, was too efficiently repressed to be jealous of the Danish Excellency. Under the mischievous influence of her friend, Eve Davenant, she would occasionally make an attempt to attract the young man; a pitiable, grotesque attempt, prompted by the desire to compel his homage, to hear herself called beautiful—which she was not. So far she did not delude herself that she had succeeded, but she did delude herself that it gave him pleasure to hear her sing. She stood now beside a little table, dispensing sirops in tall tumblers, very sallow in her white muslin, with a locket on a short gold chain hanging between the bones of her neck. Her very thin brown arms, which were covered with small black hairs, protruded ungracefully from the short sleeves of her dress.
Alexander presented himself before her; she had seen him coming in one of the mirrors on the walls. Madame Lafarge cherished an affection for these mirrors, because thanks to them her drawing-rooms always appeared twice as crowded as they really were.
Alexander uttered his request in a tone at once beseeching and compelling; she thought him irresistible. Nevertheless, she protested: there were too many people present, her singing would interrupt all conversation, her mother would be annoyed. But those standing near by seconded Alexander, and Madame Lafarge herself bore down majestically upon her daughter, so that all protest was at an end.
Julie stood beside the open piano with her hands loosely folded in a rehearsed and approved attitude while the room disposed itself to listen, and Alexander, who was to accompany her, let his fingers roam negligently over the keyboard. Chairs were turned to face the piano, people drifted in from the farther drawing-room, young men leaned in the doorways and against the walls. Lafarge folded his arms across his chest, freeing his imprisoned beard by an upward movement of his chin, and smiled encouragingly and benignly at his daughter. Speech dropped into whispers, whispers into silence. Alexander struck a few preliminary chords. Julie sang; she sang, quite execrably, romantic German music, and out of the roomful of people only three, herself, her father, and her mother, thought that she sang well. Despite this fact she was loudly applauded, congratulated, and pressed for more.
Julian Davenant, taking advantage of the diversion to escape from the sisters Christopoulos, slipped away to one of the window recesses where he could partly conceal himself behind the stiff, brocaded curtain. Horizontal strings of sunlight barred the Venetian blind, and by peeping between its joints he could see the tops of the palms in the Legation forecourt, the iron grille which gave on to the main street, and a victoria standing near the grille, in the shade, the horse covered over with a flimsy, dust-coloured sheet, and the driver asleep inside the carriage, a fly-whisk drooping limply in his hand. He could hear the shrill squeaking of the tram as it came round the corner, and the clang of its bell. He knew that the sea lay blue beyond the white town, and that, out in the sea, lay the Islands, where the little grapes were spread, drying into currants, in the sun. He returned to the darkened, candle-lit room, where Julie Lafarge was singing 'Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.'
Looking across the room to the door which opened on to the landing at the top of the stairs, he saw a little stir of arrival, which was suppressed in order to avoid any interruption to the music. He distinguished the new-comer, a short, broad, middle-aged woman, out of breath after mounting the stairs, curiously draped in soft copper-coloured garments, with gold bangles on her bare arms, and a wreath of gold leaves round her dark head. He knew this woman, a singer. He neither liked nor disliked her, but had always thought of her as possessing a strangely classical quality, all the stranger because of her squat, almost grotesque ugliness; although not a dwarf, her great breadth gave her the appearance of one; but at the same time she was for him the embodiment of the wealth of the country, a kind of Demeter of the Islands, though he thought of Demeter as having corn-coloured hair, like the crops over which she presided, and this woman had blue-black hair, like the purple of the grapes that grew on the Islands. He had often heard her sing, and hoped now that she was arriving in her professional capacity, which seemed probable, both from her dress, and from the unlikelihood that she, a singer and a woman of the native people, would enter Madame Lafarge's house as a guest, renowned though she was, and fêted, in the capitals of Europe. He saw Lafarge tiptoe out to receive her, saw Madame Lafarge follow, and noted the faintly patronising manner of the Minister's wife in shaking hands with the artist.
Applause broke out as Julie finished her song. The Greek singer was brought forward into the room amid a general movement and redistribution of groups. Alexander Christopoulos relinquished his place at the piano, and joined the Davenant boy by the window. He appeared bored and languid.
'It is really painful ... as well listen to a macaw singing,' he said. 'You are not musical, are you, Julian? You can scarcely imagine what I endured. Have you heard this woman, Kato?'
Julian said that he had.