chesa's own gray locks were the particular chevelure in question: they were very beautiful.
And he marvelled that Noémi with her dauntless eyes and blood-red hair, her big mouth and lascivious arms, Noémi who had seized her opportunities with unerring promptitude, whose contours were magnificently tigerish, whose regrets were heavily scented, whose poetic resignations were in terms of hundred-thousand-dollar compromises with talking machine—companies, could, for all that, so etherealize herself as to sing this song, and a dozen others, with a subconscious regard for its frail charm surpassing that of any artist living.
In his youth she had played a role in his life for which he must be forever grateful. But like the Queen Bee, she had fulfilled her mission, so far as his own hive of ideas was concerned, his own awakening to the romantic promises of life. His ventures into art were the honeycomb, and, even yet, what prodigies of honey might not flow into the cells! The music and the sight of Olga Vaudreuil, who also had dissolved under the spell cast by the great artist, had stirred in him wisps and tag-ends of infinitudes that had long lain dormant. Life begins tomorrow—the old illusion was back, with the old force of conviction.
As a finale Noémi was singing the popular love-song of two seasons back, the ditty with the haunting twist in its rhythm, and he recalled the mood it had evoked in him when he had first heard it on the lips of an
