"...He noticed she tried to relax her body, to make herself like a child hearing a favorite story. But her hands tightened on the carved wooden arms and for a hundredth of a second she was suffering in an electric chair. Then she sank back again and tried to annihilate herself in the melody.
Some women possess their beauty as they do a custom sportscar or thoroughbred horse. They drive it hard to every appointment and grant interviews from the saddle. The lucky ones have small accidents and learn to walk on the street, because nobody wants to listen to an arrogant old lady. Some women wear moss over their beauty and occasionally something rips it away - a lover, a pregnancy, maybe a death - and an incredible smile shows through, deep happy eyes, perfect skin, but this is temporary and soon the moss re-forms. Some women study and counterfeit beauty. Industries have been established to serve these women, and men are conditioned to favor them. Some women inherit beauty as a family feature, and learn to value it slowly, as the scion of a great family becomes proud of an unusual chin because so many distinguished men bore it. And some women, women like shell, create it as they go along, changing not so much their faces as the air around them. They break down old rules of light and cannot be interpreted or compared. They make every room original.
He believed she was in some kind of pain, or rather, defeat. The loveliness she composed seemed to rebel and escape her, as sometimes a poem under the pen becomes wild and uncontrollable..."
