Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer
projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand
gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly
virginal sea....
Then the illusion snapped like a nest of threads; the room grouped
itself around him, voices, faces, movement; the garish shimmer of the
lights overhead became real, became portentous; breath began, the slow
respiration that she and he took in time with this docile hundred, the
rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meaningless play and interplay and
tossing and reiterating of word and phrase--all these wrenched his
senses open to the suffocating pressure of life--and then her voice came
at him, cool as the suspended dream he had left behind.
"I belong here," she murmured, "I'm like these people."
For an instant this seemed a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at
him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her
entrancement had increased--her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who
swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year's mellowest fox-trot:
"Something--goes
Ring-a-ting-a-ling-a-ling
Right in-your ear--"
Again she spoke, from the centre of this pervasive illusion of her own.
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