Clare laughed, still sitting upright with her hands lying on her wine-red dress. He could only see the profile of her face.
"That is as may be. It is not so easy as I had thought to become a great prima donna. They want me to work. I detest working." She shrugged her bare, smooth shoulders. "Life is too short for spending its best years in stuffy German parlours singing scales that no one but an old professor wants to hear." Suddenly she turned upon him her full loveliness. "Why do you ask?"
"I—I——" Godfrey Neale himself was at a loss for words, feeling gauche as any country bumpkin.
"Do you disapprove?" Clare continued cheerfully.
"Yes," he said, unreasoningly rude. "I do. Decidedly. You, singing for the public, for just any ass——"
She opened her dark eyes very wide. "But why not? Not all the public are asses. Besides, my mother does it. She acts."
"Oh, I did—didn't mean that. I mean, it seems somehow such a waste."
"Waste? Comme vous êtes drôle! Ils sont tous fous, les anglais." She laughed again, teasing him, knowing how much he hated for her to speak French, partly because it was a foreign language, partly because he dreaded more than anything in the world that she should make a fool of him. "Why a waste? Is it not better to sing for the many than for the few?"
"No, no. It is not." He fumbled indignantly with his ideas, only knowing that he could not bear the thought of her, standing on show for any fool to gape at, any ill-bred, foreign fool, greasy Germans, nincompoop Frenchmen, Italians—ugh!
"How very English you are, Mr. Neale. That proprietary instinct. You want everything for yourself, land, ladies, music. You would like to put up a notice on me like you put up on your woods. 'Trespassers will be prosecuted.'"