He was getting up now, and assisting his companion with her wrap. How she hated that young woman for some reason, the blond-haired, simple, surely stupid-looking one, how could he be interested in her, and yet there was a certain something about her, in the fullness of her lush, painted lips, how frightful, she used make-up, the sweet width but suggested softness of her shoulders, the roundedness of her bared forearms, something animal-like there, and, in her way of carrying herself, even sensual, primitive. Doubtless she granted him sexual favors, the whore, the slut! And he so naive and undisciplined as to accept them, to permit her to be such, not to call her to her higher self, had she one, and reform her, if it were possible with such as she! She had no right to be with one such as he! She was not an intellectual! Surely she knew nothing! Yet there was a vitality, and sensuousness, about her, and consider that vital, well-curved figure, even buxom, so animal-like, one of the sort which might attract lower men, or perhaps even excite unwary, better men in moments of weakness, men were so weak, and note that movement of the shoulders, just then, and, there, now, that way of looking about, over her shoulder, that cunning motion which might deter them from noting the absence of cultivated, worthy personness.
How she hated the woman!
When the woman turned about, she seemed for a moment surprised to find herself the object of such a regard, one so disapproving, so severe. Then the lips of the younger woman curled and her eyes flickered for an instant with amusement. Perhaps she had met such gazes before from such as the older woman, gazes, and stares, and such, perhaps of envy, hatred, and hostility, the cold, fixed gazes and stares of women whose youth and beauty were behind them, and who seemed to wish to do little now but resent and castigate, and scorn, the possessors of the treasures now forever lost to themselves, the pleasures, fruits and ecstasies of which they, in their own time, had been denied, or had denied themselves; perhaps they had been the unwitting victims of politically motivated secular asceticisms; perhaps they had been tricked out of their own birthright, having been led to accept a voluntary unrealized incarceration, taught to make themselves miserable, grieving, self-congratulating prisoners, required to pretend to contentment within the bars, within the cold walls, of an inhibitory value system; perhaps they were merely the unhappy, cruelly shaped, psychologically deformed products of an engineered apparatus, one designed to take natural organisms, bred for open fields, and grass and sunlight, and force them into the prepared, procrustean niches of a pervasive, self-perpetuating, invisible social mechanism, into a titanic, neuteristic architecture of human deprivation, and social expediency.
The younger woman was then coming up the aisle, toward the exit.
How their eyes had locked together for that moment, the eyes of the older woman bright with hatred, and cold hostility, the eyes of the younger woman sparkling with a secure, insouciant amusement.
The older woman had seen in that moment that the eyes of the younger, those of the charming, stupid-looking slut, as she saw her, were blue. Her hair then might be naturally blond, not that that mattered in the least. She was a low sort. Her hair was long, rich, and silky, the sort in which a man’s hands might idly play. It was probably dyed, false, dyed! She had no right to be with such a man!
The young man had followed his companion into the aisle.
Their eyes met, and the older woman shrank back. She trembled. She almost fell. She turned and seized the top of a seat, with both hands, to steady herself. It seemed the same! He was so close! The resemblance was uncanny, shocking, indescribable.
He looked at her with no sign of recognition.
“Excuse me,” he said, and moved about her.
The voice, she thought. It is the same! The same! But it could not be the same, of course. Yet it seemed so much the same!
He was moving away.
Unaccountably, unable to restrain herself, she hurried after him, and pathetically seized at his sleeve.
He turned about, seeming puzzled.
She stammered. “Did you enjoy the performance? I thought I once knew someone like you. Long ago!”
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“Do you, do you?” she begged.
“Are you well?” he asked.
“Yes, yes,” she stammered. “I just wondered if you enjoyed the performance.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I thought I knew you,” she whispered, “I mean, someone like you, once, long ago.”
“It was adequate,” he remarked. “I must be going now. My friend will be waiting.”
“I thought the performance was powerful,” she whispered.
He shrugged, the same shrug, it seemed!
“Do you attend the opera often?” she asked, pressingly.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Next Saturday we may see the new staging of La Bohème.”
A husband and wife, interestingly, were to sing Rodolfo and Mimi in that production.
“Good-day,” he said, and turned away, moving toward the exit.
She felt herself a fool, and how annoyed he must have been, though his demeanor was the image of forbearance and courtesy itself. Perhaps, she thought, she should run after him, to apologize, she, in her fifties, and despite her status as an academician, one not unknown in her field, surely one with suitable publications, one with, too, impeccable credentials. But that would not do, of course. She should not run after him.