Who prepared her meals? Loneliness of the Beast; all the time she stayed there, she saw no evidence of another human prese the trays of food had arrived on a dumb waiter ihe mahogany cupboard in her parlour. Dinner was eggs Be and grilled veal; she ate it as she browsed in a book she had found in the rosewood revolving bookcase, a colle of courtly and elegant French fairy tales about white cats who were transformed princesses and fairies who were birds. Then she pulled a sprig of muscat grapes from a fat bunch for her dessert and found herself yawning; she discovered she was bored. At that, the spaook hold of her skirt with its velvet mouth and gave a firm but geug. She allowed the dog to trot before her to the study in which her father had beeertained and there, to her well-disguised dismay, she found her host, seated beside the fire with a tray of coffee at his elbow from which she must pour.
The voice that seemed to issue from a cave full of echoes, his dark, soft rumbling growl; after her day of pastel-coloured idleness, how could she verse with the possessor of a voice that seemed an instrument created to inspire the terror that the chords of great ans bring? Fasated, almost awed, she watched the firelight play on the gold fringes of his mane; he was irradiated, as if with a kind of halo, and she thought of the first great beast of the Apocalypse, the winged lion with his paw upon the Gospel, Saint Mark. Small talk turo dust in her mouth; small talk had never, at the best of times, beeys forte, and she had little practice at it.
But he, hesitantly, as if he himself were in awe of a young girl who looked as if she had been carved out of a single pearl, asked after her fathers law case; and her dead mother; and how they, who had been so rich, had e to be so poor. He forced himself to master his shyness, which was that of a wild creature, and so, she trived to master her own -- to such effect that soon she was chattering away to him as if she had known him all her life. Whetle cupid in the gilt clo the mantelpiece struck its miniature tambourine, she was astoo discover it did so twelve times.
"So late! You will want to sleep," he said.
At that, they both fell silent, as if these strange panions were suddenly overe with embarrassment to find themselves together, alone, in that room in the depths of winters night. As she was about to rise, he flung himself at her feet and buried his head in her lap. She stayed stock-still, transfixed; she felt his hot breath on her fingers, the stiff bristles of his muzzle grazing her skin, the rough lapping of his tongue and then, with a flood of passion, uood: all he is doing is kissing my hands.
He drew back his head and gazed at her with his green, inscrutable eyes, in which she saw her face repeated twice, as small as if it were in bud. Then, without another word, he sprang from the room and she saw, with an indescribable shock, he went on all fours.
day, all day, the hills on which the snow still settled echoed with the Beasts rumbling roar: has master gone a-hunting? Beauty asked the spaniel. But the spaniel growled, almost bad-temperedly, as if to say, that she would not have answered, even if she could have.
Beauty would pass the day in her suite reading or, perhaps, doing a little embroidery; a box of coloured silks and a frame had been provided for her. Or, well ed up, she wandered in the walled garden, among the leafless roses, with the spa her h