It was Loring's attitude throughout the scene that chiefly impressed Amaldi. "It is not possible...." he kept saying to himself. "No ... it's impossible...."
But the more he noticed those sullen, lowering glances of Loring in their direction, the more he felt that what he declared "impossible" was a fact.
Was that, then, the secret of Sophy's tired, subdued eyes? Did she still love that handsome, sulky boy, while he turned from her to this obvious young seductress? Amaldi felt hot with pain and anger at the mere surmise. Yet the situation was most likely. And if it were so, Belinda was "playing him off" to rouse the other's jealousy. "Little minx!" thought Amaldi in English. It made him furious to think that she might be using him in this way in the very presence of the woman he adored.
He went away some moments later with a troubled spirit. What could friendship avail here? He had not realised that part of his high mood had come from the conjecture that Sophy no longer loved the man she had married. What had he or "friendship" to do in a galère already weighted to the water-line with love and jealousy? Hope is so inevitably one with love, even the love that has decided on the stony path of "friendship." He had hoped ... what had he hoped? Down the long vista of years—what was it that he had glimpsed at the far end, as one glimpses sunlight at the end of a long, dark tunnel? He sat far into the night thinking—brooding.
But day brought counsel. He decided that he had jumped to premature conclusions. He determined to pursue the course that he had at first planned. At least, in this way, he would arrive at the truth. Now he only fumbled with conjecture. The first thing must be to win Sophy to a feeling of confidence in their renewed relations.
And very exquisitely, by fine indirection, he put her at her ease with him—conveyed the impression that time had done its work-a-day task of sobering passionate emotion into tranquil esteem.
Life had dealt rather harshly with them both. They had both grasped Illusion—flower of Maya—and been stung by the serpent coiled beneath. But a friendship such as this was not illusion. It wore no veils—its speech was plain and sober—it went clad in honest homespun. Had not Amaldi himself once told her that he was not a sentimentalist? This honest, daylight feeling that had now sprung up between them had in it no sentimentality. She did not want sentiment. She wanted this that Amaldi gave her—communion and stimulus, clear and bracing as a day of her Virginian autumn. It was so long—so unbelievably long—since she had talked pleasantly with a man who was interested in the things that she found interesting. And they would sit often, over the tea-table on the sea-lawn, before the others came in from driving or riding, exchanging ideas on philosophy and religion and poetry and art. She asked Amaldi about his everyday life. He replied smiling that he had become as ardent an agriculturist as Cavour had once been. Sophy did not know about this phase in the great statesman's career. She was deeply interested. It came out that Amaldi had been asked to give some lectures on the "Risorgimento" that coming winter at Columbia University. The idea rather pleased him, he said. He thought of taking Cavour as his chief subject.
Sophy kindled at the idea. It made her own problems and disappointments seem insignificant to think of the gigantic odds with which that great being contended all his life, and to selfless ends.
"How worth while it all was—his struggle and his Victory!" she cried.
Her eyes dilated—grew brilliant as he remembered them in other days.