Out of the Past — page 90: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Out of the Past. 87 to give herself to her music for comfort. She had twice played before she could overcome a sense of strife and enigma. She tried to think of other faces than the hard, glaring masks which she felt fixed upon her. One of them tittered constantly behind her fan, to whom Saline moved noiselessly, remarking over the woman’s shoulder: “Once more, little fool, and the door will be opened for you. See if you can behave like a woman for once.” And again to another: “Would monsieur prefer the smoking-room? There will be no talking here until _m/amselle has finished.” So she whipped them into sub- mission, and at last the room was quiet. Then the strangeness of the company rose upon the heated air and filtered back into the imaginations of both men and women until, to some, there were voices of de- nunciation whispering in the pauses and, to others, the terrible phantom of thought arose and demanded en- trance to the locked chambers of their brains, where their minds were stifling—a rare form of torture. Over their heads the breath of the violin passed in unearthly purity, and at last all else was still. Rose had forgotten them. She had conjured to her aid a vision of sunlit sands and heaving sea. She had passed the narrow boundaries of the low and mean into the unbounded Land of Dreams, where perfections have EMRNIECLOOO KS x