She looked at him in wonder. "Like what? The play?" She drew a
long breath. "I feel as if it had almost killed me."
He understood when they were in their room and she could hardly
undress before falling into a sleep so relaxed, so profound,
that it made him a little uneasy. It seemed to him the
exhaustion of a child worn out with the excitement of a
spectacle. And her failure to go into ecstasies the next day led
him further into the same error. "Modjeska is very good as
_Magda_," said he, carelessly, as one talking without expecting
to be understood. "But they say there's an Italian
woman--Duse--who is the real thing."
Modjeska--Duse--Susan seemed indeed not to understand. "I hated
her father," she said. "He didn't deserve to have such a
wonderful daughter."
Spenser had begun to laugh with her first sentence. At the
second he frowned, said bitterly: "I might have known! You get
it all wrong. I suppose you sympathize with _Magda_?"
"I worshiped, her " said Susan, her voice low and tremulous with
the intensity of her feeling.
Roderick laughed bitterly. "Naturally," he said. "You can't
understand."
An obvious case, thought he. She was indeed one of those
instances of absolute lack of moral sense. Just as some people
have the misfortune to be born without arms or without legs, so
others are doomed to live bereft of a moral sense. A sweet
disposition, a beautiful body, but no soul; not a stained soul,
but no soul at all.
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