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"Do you care for this idolatry?" Madame Zanidov asked Lilla, in her precise English. "But then after all so few are here to worship the animals. Perhaps rather to be worshipped," she suggested pleasantly, casting her glance over Lilla's face and costume.
But once more the cry, "Hear me!" rose to contest with that demoniacal uproar. When she had remained motionless for a while with upturned face, weariness rolled down upon her like an avalanche. The moonlight, creeping through the tangles, covered her prostrate body. She was dreaming that Anna Zanidov stood before her in the barbarically painted evening gown. She sat up with a bound.
Weak and sick, she glanced down at the buttons of her gloves, before rising to her feet. She heard Anna Zanidov saying to Fanny Brassfield, "Well, I've lost those friends of mine. No matter. I'll find a taxi." Pouncing upon this chance to escape, for the moment, from him and from herself, Lilla blurted out: "Let me give you a lift. Come on."
She went out leaving him dumfounded by her appearance of feverish eagerness, energy, and illness. On the ride to New York she lay back in the corner of the limousine, her face burning, her lips pressed together. "He thinks I don't love him, it seems!" That was the tender menace she hurled ahead of her, as the car carried her swiftly yet how slowly! toward his rooms. She remembered Anna Zanidov.
This painting, in this room, was like a gesture of Aunt Althea's real self. "How well she kept her secret," Lilla thought "She was rather heroic, it seems." And she felt as surprised a sadness as though she were the first who had not quite appreciated the departed. "The departed!" The prophecy of Madame Zanidov "that incredible balderdash!" even woke her in the night.
Behind the glistening windowpanes the scene was continually melting from one blackness into another. At each flash of radiance Madame Zanidov was revealed motionless in her corner, muffled in her cloak, with closed eyes. "Is she reading my thoughts?" Lilla wondered.
"Would it, indeed?" "I am desperate," Lilla responded in low tones. After a while Madame Zanidov, with a compassionate austerity, responded: "Remember, then, that it is you who wished this." Their hands touched. In the rushing limousine, in this fluidity of lights and darkness, they were intent on the phenomenon that both believed to be a revelation of fate.
There you will meet a man as lithe as a panther, his shoulders covered with gold, driving his sword through the neck of a bull. You are speaking to him at night. He kisses your hands. But that, too, will soon end in laughter. You will marry three times, but never be a widow." She opened her eyes, to gaze thoughtfully at Lilla. They asked Madame Zanidov if she really saw those things.
To check that inexorable progress! to see some constant light! Anna Zanidov turned her wedge-shaped face toward Lilla, with the words: "I have thought of you many times." "I can say the same." "To be sure," the Russian declared, "I have stopped doing that, you know. I didn't want to end by being shunned." "I suppose you still have the gift?" "No doubt." The limousine halted.
"All my life I have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently I shall wake and wonder why all these figments gave me so much pain." She floated deliciously in this thought. She reflected, with a vague smile: "I must go and restore the appearance of happiness to that poor phantom downstairs."
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