and out into the lobby, and everywhere one looked, the hostile fear and insecurity of the people were apparent. For the most part the audience was fashionably dressed, the men in evening dress, the women in expensive evening gowns, that revealed their long white arms, the velvet perfection of their breasts and long backs. It would have been difficult to find a more assured, sophisticated and wealthy-looking group of people, but in spite of this air of complete worldly assurance, their unhappiness and fear were painfully evident. Their bodies seemed to throw off and to fill the air with a feverish electric tension, the texture of their thousand voices rising all together in a braided clamour was almost hysterically high, and remembering suddenly the quiet murmurous drone of voices in a theatre twenty years before, the glamorous spell of enchantment and happiness that surrounded even the performances of some travelling company in its one-night appearance in a little town, one felt poignantly again that something old and pleasant had gone out of life, that something dissonant, painful and unwholesome had changed man’s rhythm, spread a poisonous infection through the human chemistries.
One also saw, or rather powerfully felt, among these fashionable and worldly-looking men of the great city, something jaded, puny, sterile, horribly weary; a quality as if their vital energies had been depleted in an unnatural way, as if they were emptied out, dried up, sapped of their juice, and could keep going now only by a kind of lifeless dynamism, a dry electric energy which paced them to the tempo of the city’s furious life, which would not let them go until it had burned them hollow to a dry grey shell.
By contrast, the vivid loveliness of the women was astonishing. The differences that distinguished these women from these men, in colouring, in the velvety texture of the skin, in the sparkling eyes, red mouths, voluptuously seductive bodies and general healthiness and glowing elasticity of figure, were so great that one was reminded of those insect species whose females are wonderfully and fatally superior in strength and beauty to their drab mates, and who finally devour them. And yet, even in the faces and figures of these lovely women, the mutilation of that hard, metallic, blunted-out stamp was also evident: one noticed that the general quality of the tone of all these mixed and intermingled voices was feminine rather than masculine, and that the feminine voice was even more assertive, arrogant and incisive in its naked penetration than the voices of the men.
