“It is one of the things which keeps me so remote, so absolutely aloof,” she thought hurriedly, “what do women want with divinity or any other superhuman attribute? I believe Rossetti must have thought of me for his ‘Lilith’.”
She stood up half absently and looked into a mirror near at hand, then she moved away suddenly with sneering lips and a quick flush.
“That’s not the fire!” her husband thought, “Oh Lord, what’s up now?”
After a few minutes she went slowly over to the piano, and began to play in a vague fitful way. Her husband dropped the paper he had taken up, and listened. It struck him that her playing had altered, it used to be mechanical and rather expressionless, no one could accuse it of want of expression to-night, even if the expression did limit itself to anger and unrest.
After a time she stopped playing, with one dissatisfied, disordered chord, then there was a little pause which she broke by singing, first softly and half humming, then she seemed to awaken with a start, and she sang on, song after song, with a sort of excited vehemence. Her voice was a low contralto, there was not a sharp nor a hard tone in it, but there were some strong harsh ones, like the groans of men, and some deep guttural ones, like the sighs of women; there was no passion in her voice, but it was full of consuming soft tumults of vague sad unrest.
“This is rather a pleasanter modification of her first storms!” thought Strange. “What possibilities there are in that voice, I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to kiss that dead woman into life! Pygmalion’s task was a fool to mine, what’s marble to an undeveloped woman!”
He stood behind her and joined in with her song, his bass to her contralto. The combination gave one rather a shock at first, but it grew fascinating as they went on.
Gwen stopped suddenly in the middle of a song.
“I could not have believed our two voices could ever mix and make completeness.”
“I like explicable things best,” she said, peering out into the semi-gloom.
“You go about with a scalpel in your brain, Gwen! What a thing it is to come of scientific stock!”
“Oh, it’s a diabolical thing for a woman!” said Gwen.
She shut the piano up softly—she never by any chance banged things—and went upstairs to dress.