to give his arm a push, while crying out:

"Go get her for me, Jimmy. Anna Zanidov. There, with those people in
the aisle."

The Russian woman appeared before them in a black turban and a
voluminous black cloak. Her flat, vermilion lips were parted in a
social smile; but her Tartar eyes remained inscrutable. Her face,
wedge-shaped, dead white, with its look of being made from some
material more rigid than flesh, was as startling as the countenance of
an Oriental image, in its frame of glossy black fur. Sitting down, she
assumed that close-kneed hieratic attitude habitual to her, which made
Lilla see her once more in the barbarically painted evening gown, amid
superstitious women breathless from awe.

"Do you care for this idolatry?" Madame Zanidov asked Lilla, in her
precise English. "But then after all so few are here to worship the
animals. Perhaps rather to be worshipped," she suggested pleasantly,
casting her glance over Lilla's face and costume.

All around her, indeed, Lilla could see the pretty women in their
slate-gray and rust-colored cloaks, in their rakish little toques from
under which their sophisticated eyes peeped out in search of homage.
Some had the expression of those for whom love is an assured phenomenon
solving all questions. Others seemed to be waiting impatiently for its
advent or its departure. But all, Lilla thought, looked assured either
of its persistence or its recurrence. Amid them she felt as isolate as
a ghost.

The men approached them with confident smiles, long limbed, with
leisurely and supple movements, smart in their heavy tweeds or riding
breeches that suggested habits of strenuous exertion. When they
removed their hats, one saw their close-clipped heads bending forward
confidentially toward the fair faces: and their eyes slowly followed
the eyes of the women who were contemplating absentmindedly the
rippling muscles of the horses in the arena. A band in a balcony began
to play Strauss's _Wiener Mad'l_, the strains of music muffled by the
dust, the lights, the movement of the audience, the pain in Lilla's
breast. And the vague savor of stables and flowers, the statuesque
postures of beasts and the expectant attitudes of human beings, were
suddenly fused together into one hallucination--a flood of sensory
impressions at once unreal and too actual, in which Lilla found herself
sinking and smothering.

Anna Zanidov was looking at her intently.

"You do not often co