The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

same, but the spectacle was similar in the way the blonde woman’s voice was disturbingly at odds with her body. Miss Temple knew this was partially because of the mask—she had done a great deal of thinking about masks—and was oddly stirred by the movement of the woman’s coral-pink lips as they opened and shut within a proscenium of vivid feathers…the unsettling spectacle of her pale face, the puffed fleshy lips—though they were thin, they were still quite evidently tender—the glimpse of white teeth and the deeper pink of her gums and tongue. Miss Temple had a sudden impulse to shove two fingers into the woman’s mouth, just to feel how warm it was. But she caught her wandering mind and shook away that shocking thought, for the lady
was
finally speaking.

    “I am actually most agreeable, even tractable, that is the thing of it—and when one is of such a temperament, one is
known
and thus gets no credit for being so, people take it as assumed and then want more—they always want more, and such is my nature, for I have always strived within the boundaries of polite society to provide what I can to anyone I can, for I have tried not to be proud, for I could be proud, I could be the proudest girl in the land—I have every right to be whatever I want, and it is vexing, for there are times when I feel that I ought to be, that I ought to be another Queen, more than the Queen, for the Queen is old and horrid-looking—and the worst part is that if I just chose to be that way, if I just did start ordering and screaming and demanding, I would get it, I would get exactly that—but now I wonder if that is really true, I wonder if it’s all gone on so long that no one would listen, that they would laugh in my face, or at least behind my back, the way they all laugh behind my back—even though I am who I am—and they would simply do what they are doing already, save more openly and without pretense, with disdain which I do not think I could bear, and my father is the worst of them, he has always been the worst and now he does not see me at all, he does not even attempt to care—he has never cared—and I am expected without question to accept a future chosen for me. No one knows the life I lead. None of you care—and this man, this vulgar
man
—I am expected—a foreigner—it is appalling—and my only solace is that I have always known that he—whoever he turned out to be—would prove the utter ruin of my heart.”

    The woman drank off her fourth glass of port—and who knew how many she’d consumed before Miss Temple’s arrival?—grimaced, and reached at once for the decanter. Miss Temple thought of her own father—craggy, full of rage, impossibly distant, only arbitrarily kind. Her only way of understanding her father was to consider him a natural force, like the ocean or the clouds, and to weather sunny days and storms alike without being personally aggrieved. She knew he had fallen ill, that he would most likely not be living once she returned—if she ever did return—to her island home. It was a thought to prick her conscience with sorrow if she let it, but she did not let it, for she did not really know if the sadness was any different from that she felt at missing the tropical sun. Miss Temple believed that change brought sorrow as a matter of course. Was there particular sadness in her father’s absence—either on account of distance or death? Was there sorrow in the fact that she could not for certain say? Her mother she had never known—a young woman (younger than Miss Temple was now, which was a strange thought) slain by the birth of her child. So many people in the world were disappointing, who was to say the lack of any one more was a loss? Such was Miss Temple’s normal waspish response to the expression of sympathy at her mother’s absence, and if there did exist a tiny deeply set wound within her heart, she did not spend time excavating it for the benefit of strangers, or for that matter anyone at all. Nevertheless, for some reason she could not—or chose not to—name, she found her sympathies touched by the masked woman’s jumbled ranting.
    “If you were to see him,” she asked kindly, “what do you guess the Comte d’Orkancz would advise you to do?”
    The woman laughed bitterly.
    “Then why don’t you leave?”
    “And where am I to go?”
    “I’m sure there are many places—”
    “I cannot
leave
! I am
obliged
!”
    “Refuse the obligation. Or if you cannot