"The content is there, true enough, but humans don't work like magic. We feel things, feel them deep in the pit of ourselves where everything hurts and some of it hurts beautifully--we want to feel our heartstrings bowed like a cello's, wringing notes of anguish and rapture from us--"

Her voice has risen over the course of her tirade, and when it cuts off like a muffled bell, the reverberations ring through the empty room. Her eyes are wild, her cheeks flushed with feeling; she calms herself in a twinkling, though, and speaks into the echo. "And you can't play a man's feelings with anything but your own."