not looking at the audience. She could imagine the faces. Her hands, she felt, were as cold as fresh spring water.
The silver curtains parted anew and the play proceeded. The first great moment was the appearance of the Cambodian dancer, a slender, full-bosomed bayadere, clad, like Moreau's Salome, only in jewels. Sparkling with light, her face as expressionless as a Noh mask, she stood on a small round platform in a miniature circle of illumination. Her movements were slow and insinuating; there was no abandon, no swift grace, in this dance. But she contrived to invest her slightest gesture with a leste significance, and when, seated, cross-legged, she bent her long fingers back until they touched her forearms, her face remaining the face of an unwrapped mummy, she suggested, irrevocably, the expiatory pain of a supreme sin.
Zimbule, too, tossed by the intricate intrigue of the play into the arms of one character after another, exhibited a nonchalance and rare perversity which lifted her performance into the realm of something rich and strange. In her scene with Harold, the scene of the charioteer with the boy-sculptor, a scene written in a mocking, cynical spirit, she far transcended anything, however curious, that the author had imagined. To this episode, in which Clinias, betrayed with the mistress of Hippolyte, attempts to conciliate the burly athlete, she gave a touch of mystic sensuality, aided by Bunny's music, which.
