The player upon the desert lute had not seen that some one stood in the tent door.  With half-shut eyes he continued playing and singing, lost in a sickly ecstasy.  The woman on the gaudy rug sat quite still and stared at Mrs. Armine.  She showed no surprise, no anger, no curiosity.  Her expression did not change.  Her motionless, painted mouth was set like a mouth carved in some hard material.  Only her bosom stirred with a regular movement beneath her coloured tissues, her jewels and strings of coins.

Mrs. Armine stepped into the tent and dropped the flap behind her.  She did not know what she was going to do, but she was filled with a bitter curiosity that she could not resist, with an intense desire to force her way into this woman’s life, a life so strangely different from her own, yet linked with it by Baroudi.  She hated this woman, yet with her hatred was mingled a subtle admiration, a desire to touch this painted toy that gave him pleasure, a longing to prove its attraction, to plumb the depth of its fascination, to learn from it a lesson in the strange lore of the East.  She came close up to the woman and stood beside her.

Instantly one of the painted hands went up to her jacket, and gently, very delicately, touched its fur.  Then the other hand followed, and the jacket was felt with wondering fingers, was stroked softly, first downwards, then upwards, while the dark and heavy eyes solemnly noted the thin shine of the shifting skin.  The curiosity of Mrs. Armine was met by another but childlike curiosity, and suddenly, out of the cloud of mystery broke a ray of light that was naive.

This naivete confused Mrs. Armine.  For a moment it seemed to be pushing away her anger, to be drawing the sting from her curiosity.  But then the childishness of this strange rival stirred up in her a more acrid bitterness than she had known till now.  And the wondering touch became intolerable to her.  Why should such a creature be perfectly happy, while she with her knowledge, her experience, her tempered and perfected powers, lived in a turmoil of misery?  She looked down into the Ghawazee’s eyes, and suddenly the painted hands dropped from the fur, and she was confronted by a woman who was no longer naive, who understood her, and whom she could understand.

The voice of the lute-player died away, the thin cry of the strings failed.  He had seen.  He rose to his feet, and said something in a language Mrs. Armine could not understand.  The girl replied in a voice that sounded ironic, and suddenly began to laugh.  At the same moment Baroudi came into the tent.  The girl called out to him, pointed at Mrs. Armine, and went on laughing.  He smiled at her, and answered.

“What are you saying to her?” said Mrs. Armine, fiercely.  “How dare you speak to her about me?  How dare you discuss me with her?”

“P’f!  She is a child.  She knows nothing.  The camel is ready.”

The girl spoke to him again with great rapidity, and an air of half-impudent familiarity that sickened Mrs. Armine.  Something seemed to have roused within her a sense of boisterous humour.  She gesticulated with her painted hands, and rocked on her mattress with an abandon almost negroid.  Holding his lute in one pale hand, and stroking his blue-black beard with the other, her huge and flaccid attendant looked calmly on without smiling.