It was time to dress. She did her hair, to please Oliver, in a
girlish way, parted and knotted low. Her gown, designed by Martigues,
did not fit in with this simple coiffure. She was aware of an
incongruity between the smooth, yellow bands of hair meekly
confining her small head, and the daring peacock-blue draperies
flowing in long, free lines from her shoulders, held lightly in at
the waist by a golden cord.
"One will get the better of the other before the evening is over,"
she thought with a sigh, turning away from her mirror.
"My beautiful Myra!" Oliver said as if to cheer her.
"I have never looked worse," she retorted a trifle impatiently, and
would not argue the point as they drove up town.
"We'll see what I really amount to now," she told herself.
She had never before so tensely faced an audience, but there was
more at stake than she cared to confess, and she was not equal to it.
She shone, but did not blind those thousand eyes; she sang but did
not cast enchantment. And David Cannon would not help her. He sat at
the piano, uncouth, impassive, deliberately detached, as if he gave
her and his music over to an anonymous crowd of whose existence he
was hardly aware. There was something huge and static about him,
something elemental as an earth-shape, containing in and by itself
mysterious rhythms.
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