Davidson viewed her profile with a flattened nose, a hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye.
He asked himself: Did that speak just now?
Will it speak again?
It was as exciting, for the mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a mechanism.

A smile played about the fat features of Davidson; the smile of a man making an amusing experiment.

He spoke again to her: "But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians, were they not ?" Of course, he didn't care.

He wanted to see whether the mechanism would work again.

It did.