II
“I would have you know, madame, that every woman is pleasing to man,—saving his own wife.”
“Who in turn is pleasing to his friend,—even if he chance to be a king.”
The woman on the couch tossed her slipper from her small foot, and struck a series of snapping chords from the guitar that she held in her bosom. There was a certain rich insolence in her look,—a sensuous wickedness that was wholly poetic. The man bent forward from his stool, lifted the slipper, and kissed the foot whence it had fallen. He won a smile from the face bowered up in cushions, a smile like sunlight on a brazen mirror, brilliant, clear, metallic. There was a fine flush on her face, and the star on her bosom rose and fell as her breathing seemed to quicken and deepen for the moment. Her fingers plucked waywardly at the strings as she looked out from the window towards the sea.
“I love life,” she said.
“Surely.”
“The pomp, the pride, the glory of being great. I have a future for you.”
A kind of spiritual echo burnt in the man’s eyes.