could discern a sanity beyond the understanding of the age. And there
were the concert halls given over to the very newest music, from which
Lilla emerged with her nerves exacerbated.

Then the prosceniums of the theaters framed pageants of Oriental
sensuousness--scenes of hallucinatory seductiveness and splendor,
through which, to a blare of startling music, bounded swarms of
half-naked bodies jingling with jewels.

Or, abruptly, the softness of oboes and cellos, the flagrancy of musk,
the gleam of purple light on torsoes moist from exertion, a presentment
of love as understood by ancient Eastern despots--a perverse and
gorgeous ideal resuscitated to challenge modern thought. Or perhaps,
with a sudden rush of darkness and return of light, before scenery that
tore at the nerves like a discord of trumpets, a dancer--a heathen
god--leaped high into the air, with muscles gilded as if to add an
overwhelming value to mere human flesh.

Later, the chandeliers of ballrooms, multiplied by those Louis XVI
mirrors that Lilla had derided, cast their glitter upon the bright
dresses of a new design, the coiffures that had been invented
yesterday, the jewels, maybe souvenirs of old fervors, that had been
ruthlessly reset. In glass galleries banked with azaleas, where the
waltz music was like an echo from a still more desirable world, looks
melted into embraces, or, at least, a whisper promised the kiss that
caution there denied. On all sides love was going forward: men and
women were dancing toward the pain of happiness or the strange
pleasures of tragedy. And even in the brief silence the air seemed to
ring from a concerted laugh of triumph over life.

Yet all these activities were informed with a feverish haste, a sort of
delirious greediness and apprehension, as though one must feel very
quickly everything that humanity's experiments had made the senses
capable of feeling.

Lilla stood watching this whirlpool.

Sometimes she thought of opening the Long Island house and shutting
herself up there, of collecting Chinese porcelains, of studying a new
language or religion.

"Ah, if I had some real object!"

One day she put on her hat intending to drive uptown and spend an hour
in Lawrence's old rooms; for nothing was changed there, except that
nowadays the curtains were always drawn, and the hearth was always
cold. But this time she purposed to light the fire, and pretend----

Instead, she returned to Brantome's. Some