She remained herself. Her eyes, fixed on him with that remembered look
of candid and questioning tenderness, blazed up into an anger as
unexpectedly fierce and uncompromising. And he was not so strong. He
had overworked all his life. Starved too often. The ground slipped
from under his feet.

It was a poor, vulgar show--a pantomime jerry-built to accommodate her
particular talent. She walked through it--the dumb but irresistible
model of a French atelier, who made fools of all her lovers, cheated
them, sucked them dry and tossed them off with a merry cynicism. When
the mood took her she danced and her victims danced behind her, a
grotesque ballet, laughing and clapping their hands, as though their
cruel sufferings were, after all, a good joke. Neither they nor the
audience seemed to be aware that she could not dance at all, and that
she was not even beautiful.

It was an old stunt, disguised with an insolent carelessness. The
producers had surely grinned to themselves over it. "We know what the
public likes. Rubbish, and the older the better. Give it 'em." She
even made her familiar entry between the curtains at the back of the
stage, standing in the favourite attitude of simple, triumphant
expectation, and smiling with that rather foolish friendliness that
until now had never shaken her audiences from their frigidity. To them
she had always been a spectacle, a strange vital thing with a lurid
past and a dubious future, shocking and stimulating. They would never
have admitted that they liked her. But tonight they gave her a sort of
ashamed welcome. Perhaps it was the dress she wore--the exaggerated
peg-top trousers and bonnet of a conventional Quartier Latin which made
her look frank and boyish. Perhaps it was something more subtle.
Stonehouse himself felt it. But then, he knew. He saw her as God saw
her. If there was a God He certainly had His amusing moments.

But he found himself clapping her with the rest, and that made him
angry and afraid. It seemed that he could not control his actions any
more than his thoughts. The whole business had got an unnatural hold
over him. He half got up to go, and then realized that he was trying
to escape.

It was jolly music too. That at any rate her producers had toiled at
with some zeal. Incredibly stupid and artless and jolly. Anyone could
have danced to it. And she was a gutter-urchin, flinging herself about
in the sheer joy of life (with death