“But you can’t keep the other men quiet. With your face and your voice--” “Oh, it isn’t the voice,” she said with contempt. He looked at her rather sadly. “Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes from something else?” “What?” “Your personality--your self.” “My soul!” she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. “Are we in the prehistoric Eighties?” “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.”