Their painted hands hung down like the
hands of marionettes. The one who was dancing suggested Duty clad in
Eastern garb and laying herself out carefully to be wicked. Her
jerks and wrigglings, though violent, were inhuman, like those of a
complicated piece of mechanism devised by a morbid engineer. After
a glance or two at her Domini felt that she was bored by her own
agilities. Domini's wonder increased when she looked again at the
traveller.
For it was this dance of the _ennui_ of the East which raised up in him
this obvious battle, which drove his secret into the illumination of
the hanging lamps and gave it to a woman, who felt half confused, half
ashamed at possessing it, and yet could not cast it away.
If they both lived on, without speaking or meeting, for another half
century, Domini could never know the shape of the devil in this man, the
light of the smile upon its face.
The dancing woman had observed him, and presently she began slowly to
wriggle towards him between the rows of Arabs, fixing her eyes upon
him and parting her scarlet lips in a greedy smile. As she came on the
stranger evidently began to realise that he was her bourne.
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