down: she knew how arresting
that proud, rather stiff bend of her head was. She had some aboriginal
American in her blood. But as she looked, she pursed her mouth. The
artist in her forgot everything, she was filled with disgust. The sham
Egypt of _Aida_ hid from her nothing of its shame. The singers were all
colour-washed, deliberately colour-washed to a bright orange tint. The
men had oblong dabs of black wool under their lower lip; the beard of
the mighty Pharaohs. This oblong dab shook and wagged to the singing.

The vulgar bodies of the fleshy women were unendurable. They all looked
such good meat. Why were their haunches so prominent? It was a question
Josephine could not solve. She scanned their really expensive, brilliant
clothing. It was _nearly_ right--nearly splendid. It only lacked that
last subtlety which the world always lacks, the last final clinching
which puts calm into a sea of fabric, and yet is the opposite pole to
machine fixity.

But the leading tenor was the chief pain. He was large, stout, swathed
in a cummerbund, and looked like a eunuch. This fattish, emasculated
look seems common in stage heroes--even the extremely popular. The tenor
sang bravely, his mouth made a large, coffin-shaped, yawning gap in his
orange face, his little beard fluttered oddly, like a tail. He turned
up his eyes to Josephine's box as he sang--that being the regulation
direction. Meanwhile his abdomen shook as he caught his breath, the
flesh of his fat, naked arms swayed.

Josephine looked down with the fixed gravity of a Red Indian, immovable,
inscrutable. It was not till the scene was ended that she lifted her
head as if breaking a spell, sent the point of her tongue rapidly over
her dried lips, and looked round into the box. Her brown eyes expressed
shame, fear, and disgust. A curious grimace went over her face--a
grimace only to be expressed by the exclamation _Merde!_ But she was
mortally afraid of society, and its fixed institutions. Rapidly she
scanned the eyes of her friends in the box. She rested on the eyes of
Lilly, a dark, ugly man.

"Isn't it nasty?" she said.

"You shouldn't look so closely," he said. But he took it calmly, easily,
whilst she felt floods of burning disgust, a longing to destroy it all.

"Oh-ho-ho!" laughed Julia. "It's so fu-nny--so funny!"

"Of course we are too near," said Robert.

"Say you admire that pink fondant over there," said Struthers,
indicating with his eyebrows a blond