“ Now I see,” cried the Contessa excitedly, watching his purely gay motion, which he had all to himself. “Mr Birkin, he is a changer.”
Hermione looked at her slowly, and shuddered, knowing that only a foreigner could have seen and have said this.
“ Cosa vuol’dire, Palestra? ” she asked, sing-song.
“ Look,” said the Contessa, in Italian. “He is not a man, he is a chameleon, a creature of change.”
“ He is not a man, he is treacherous, not one of us,” said itself over in Hermione’s consciousness. And her soul writhed in the black subjugation to him, because of his power to escape, to exist, other than she did, because he was not consistent, not a man, less than a man. She hated him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer dissolution like
