ome had been persuaded to play
Schumann.

"I know, at least," said Cornelius, "that you haven't found him yet!"

In his voice there was a gloating that made her again turn toward him
that unique face of hers, whose brownish pallor, in harmony with her
large eyes and fluffy hair, appeared to reflect amid the shadows the
radiance disseminated from her dress. In his unhappy eyes she now
perceived something that had not been there before--a desperation, as
though his heart had suffered too long from a sense of inferiority to
the unknown and unrevealed antagonist, who was to win this treasure.
For an instant, in fact, there was something weakly ferocious, not
quite sane, in this visage that had been familiar to her since
childhood. Then his habitual, well-bred, wooden look, as a door might
shut on a glimpse of an inferno.

He muttered, in his throaty, queerly didactic voice:

"Well, one must be philosophical in this life. You'll teach me that,
won't you?" He got up, patting the pocket of his waistcoat, where he
kept the little vial of oil of peppermint, which he always touched to
his tongue when he threw aside his cigarette on his way to a dancing
partner. "Are they at it?" he asked, cocking his ear toward the music
of Schumann. "Or is it only that old chap hammering the piano?"

"Don't ask me to dance to-night," she returned, closing her eyes.

"I wasn't." With the parody of a merry smile, he explained, "You know
I can't dance with you any more. You know you make my legs tremble
like the devil."

With an exclamation intended for a laugh, looking unusually bored and
vacuous, he went out of the room like a man in an earthquake sedately
strolling away between reeling and crumbling walls.

CHAPTER VII

Lilla was approaching the music room doorway--round which some men were
standing with the respectful looks of persons at the funeral of a
stranger--when a laughing young woman intercepted her.

"Do come over here. Madame Zanidov is telling our fortunes."

Anna Petrovna Zanidov, one of the Russian aristocrats that the
revolution had scattered through the world, was a thin, black-haired
woman with a faintly Tartar cast of countenance, a dead-white
complexion that made her seem denser than ordinary flesh, and somewhat
the look of an idol before whose blank yet sophisticated eyes had been
performed many extraordinary rites. Tonight her strangeness was made
doubly emphatic by a gown of oxidized silver tiss