"We are in the unchanging world."

"Unchanging! My dear boy!"

"Yes, unchanging," he repeated obstinately.

He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling
and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession
of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying
gently backwards and forwards.

"Well, Mr. Pierce, what's the matter?"

"Mr. Pierce!" he said, almost savagely.

"Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of
early Eighty yearns--"

"How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?" he
exclaimed, turning on her. "You say you care for nothing but the outside
of things--the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for
nothing else. Yet when you sing you--you--"

"What do I do?"

"It's as if another woman than you were singing in you--a woman totally
unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which
you care nothing about."

"The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis," she
said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. "If this"--she touched her
face--"were to be changed into--shall we say a Filberte countenance?"

"Oh!" he exclaimed.

"There! You see, directly I put the matter before you, you have to agree
with me!"

"No one could sing like you and have a face like a silly sheep."

"Poor Miss Filberte! Well, then, suppose me disfigured and singing
better than ever--what man would listen to me?"

"I should."

"For half a minute. Then you'd say, 'Poor wretch, she's lost her voice!'
No, no, it's my face that sings to the world, my face the world loves to
listen to, my face that makes me friends and--enemies."

She looked into his eyes with impertinent directness.

"It's my face that's made Mr. Robin Pierce deceive himself into the
belief that he only worships women for their souls, their lovely
natures, their--"

"Do you know that in a way you are a singularly modest woman?" he
suddenly interrupted.

"Am I? How?"

"In thinking that you hold people only by your appearance, that your
personality has nothing to say in the matter."

"I am modest, but not so modest as that."

"Well, then?"

"Personality is a crutch, a pretty good crutch; but so long as men are
men they will put crutches second and--something else first. Yes, I know
I'm a little bit vulgar, but everybody in London is."

"I wish you lived in Rome."

"I've seen people being v