"Thank God!" she replied. "You haven't stopped to think where I'd be if
I weren't. And yet, no one, in their work, is supposed to be more
emotional. It's funny, and I don't pretend to understand. The trouble
with me is that I have no life of my own: ever since I was sixteen I've
done what directors told me, for the public; it is time I had some
private feelings."

"It must be a nuisance," he agreed.

Another dance began, but neither of them stirred; from where Lee sat
the long doors were panels of shifting colors and movement. The music
beat, fluctuated, in erratic bars. A deep unhappiness possessed him, an
appalling loneliness that sometimes descended on him in crowds. Even
Fanny, the thought of his children, could not banish it. Above the drum
he thought he could hear the sibilant dissatisfaction of the throng
striving for an eternity of youth. The glass about the porch, blotted
with night, was icy cold, but it was hot within; the steam pipes were
heated to their full capacity, and the women's painted and powdered
faces were streaked--their assumption of vitality and color was running
from them.

"Hideous," Mina Raff said with a small grimace. She had the strange
ability of catching his unexpressed thoughts and putting them into
words. "Women," she went on, "spend all their money and half their
lives trying to look well, and you'd suppose they would learn
something, but they don't."

"What do women dress for?" he demanded; "is it to make themselves
seductive to men or to have other women admire and envy them?"