Josephine was an artist.  In Paris she was a friend of a very fashionable dressmaker and decorator, master of modern elegance.  Sometimes she designed dresses for him, and sometimes she accepted from him a commission to decorate a room.  Usually at her last sou, it gave her pleasure to dispose of costly and exquisite things for other people, and then be rid of them.

This evening her dress was a simple, but a marvellously poised thing of black and silver:  in the words of the correct journal.  With her tight, black, bright hair, her arched brows, her dusky-ruddy face and her bare shoulders; her strange equanimity, her long, slow, slanting looks; she looked foreign and frightening, clear as a cameo, but dark, far off.  Julia was the English beauty, in a lovely blue dress.  Her hair was becomingly untidy on her low brow, her dark blue eyes wandered and got excited, her nervous mouth twitched.  Her high-pitched, sing-song voice and her hurried laugh could be heard in the theatre.  She twisted a beautiful little fan that a dead artist had given her.

Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the overture began.  The opera was Verdi—­Aida.  If it is impossible to be in an important box at the opera without experiencing the strange intoxication of social pre-eminence, it is just as impossible to be there without some feeling of horror at the sight the stage presents.

Josephine leaned her elbow and looked down:  she knew how arresting that proud, rather stiff bend of her head was.  She had some aboriginal American in her blood.  But as she looked, she pursed her mouth.  The artist in her forgot everything, she was filled with disgust.  The sham Egypt of Aida hid from her nothing of its shame.  The singers were all colour-washed, deliberately colour-washed to a bright orange tint.  The men had oblong dabs of black wool under their lower lip; the beard of the mighty Pharaohs.  This oblong dab shook and wagged to the singing.

The vulgar bodies of the fleshy women were unendurable.  They all looked such good meat.  Why were their haunches so prominent?  It was a question Josephine could not solve.  She scanned their really expensive, brilliant clothing.  It was nearly right—­nearly splendid.  It only lacked that last subtlety which the world always lacks, the last final clinching which puts calm into a sea of fabric, and yet is the opposite pole to machine fixity.

But the leading tenor was the chief pain.  He was large, stout, swathed in a cummerbund, and looked like a eunuch.  This fattish, emasculated look seems common in stage heroes—­even the extremely popular.  The tenor sang bravely, his mouth made a large, coffin-shaped, yawning gap in his orange face, his little beard fluttered oddly, like a tail.  He turned up his eyes to Josephine’s box as he sang—­that being the regulation direction.  Meanwhile his abdomen shook as he caught his breath, the flesh of his fat, naked arms swayed.