Lena, rebellious at heart, found her only diversion in occasional week-ends at other people’s country houses, or in long flights by evening in Dick’s motor. Her husband was self-absorbed and often silent, another person, as she frequently and querulously rubbed into him, from the ardent creature of a few months before.
Sometimes he made attempts to open to her his subjects of thought, but Lena never attempted to understand things that did not interest her, and now that she was safely married, it was too much trouble to make much pretense at it; so she was often alone, and frequently bored.
Even Mr. Early was away most of the time, and the great blank eyes of closed windows blinked down at her from his closed house beyond the dividing hedge that flanked the garden. His place stood on a corner, and on the two sides that fronted the streets, Sebastian had hidden the wonders of his terraces and trimmed trees by high walls, but toward the Percivals he had been less exclusive. Most of the houses in St. Etienne, like their own, had no property dividing line, but lawn melted into lawn with a park-like openness that hinted at communistic kindliness. This had its disadvantages in lack of privacy, and hence it was that in spite of quite an extensive demesne, Lena found in her own garden no spot absolutely hidden from curious eyes of passers, except in one thicket of trees and shrubbery over near the Early boundary. Here there was seclusion, and here, therefore, young Mrs. Percival had her hammock and her group of chairs and tables; and here she spent long indolent afternoons in sleepy reading and sleepier dreaming, which was only less agreeable than the social triumphs of which she dreamed. And yet she often found herself weary of nothing, and wished she had some one exactly to her taste to keep her company and talk to her about little things in that “fool’s paradise of laziness” where, it is said, Satan is entertainer in chief. Once in a while, on his brief home-stays, Mr. Early illuminated her retreat with his presence.
Toward the middle of the summer, certain business interests called Dick to North Dakota, and then life was duller than ever.
Therefore it was a not wholly unwelcome diversion when, late on an August afternoon, she saw the thick laurels of the hedge near her part a little and the form of Ram Juna stand in the cleft, snowy white from turban to slippers save for the gleaming ruby and the polished bronze face. He looked like the day itself, glowing, sultry, indolent.
“Pardon me, dear lady,” he said, “that through the bush I spied you. I was solitary. You are solitary. The heat suits not with the severer thought. The weak body refuses to yield to the commands of mind. I fail to write; and perhaps you fail to read.”
“I guess your thinking is harder work than my reading. Won’t you come over and sit down?” said Lena cordially.
“Then you, like me, would welcome companionship?”
“Yes. Isn’t this a nice shady place?” Lena answered. “The maid is just bringing me some iced drinks, and I dare say they’ll taste good to you if you have been trying to write that wonderful book of yours in all this blaze.”
The Hindu pushed the hedge still farther asunder and swept with a sigh of content over to a cushioned reclining chair.