“This is really quite too delightful! Quite too delightful, Mr. Odd!” Mrs. Archinard’s slender hand pressed his with seemingly affectionate warmth. “Katherine told us this morning about the rencontre. I was expecting you, as you see. Ten years! It seems impossible, really impossible!” Still holding his hand, she scanned his face with her sad and pretty smile. “I could hardly realize it, were it not that your books lie here beside me, living symbols of the years.”
Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, the familiar bindings.
“I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I might look over them again; strengthen my impression of your personality, join all the links before meeting you again. Dear, dear little books!” Mrs. Archinard laid her hand, with its one great emerald ring, on the “Dialogues,” which was uppermost. “Sit down, Mr. Odd; no, on this chair. The light falls on your face so. Yes, your books are to me among the most exquisite art productions of our age. Pater is more étincellant—a style too jewelled perhaps—one wearies of the chain of rather heartless beauty; but in your books one feels the heart, the aroma of life—a chain of flowers, flowers do not weary. Your personality is to me very sympathetic, Mr. Odd, very sympathetic.”
Peter was conscious of being sorry for it.
“I think we are both of us tired.” Mrs. Archinard’s smile grew even more sadly sweet; “both tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too. How few things one finds to care about! Things crumble so, once touched, do they not? Everything crumbles.” Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as Peter found nothing to say (“How dull a man who writes quite clever books can be!” thought Mrs. Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace tone—
“And you talked with dear Katherine last night; you pleased her. She told Hilda and me this morning that you really pleased her immensely. Katherine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. Odd, very, very proud. Did you not find her quite distinctive? Quite significant? I always think of Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning much.” The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archinard’s voice irritated Odd to such a pitch of ill-temper that he found it difficult to keep his own pleasant as he replied—
“Significant is most applicable. She is a charming girl.”
“Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a misapplied word it is! Every woman nowadays is called charming. The daintily distinctive term is flung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the hard, mechanical woman of the world.”
Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard was an ass—very unjustly—Mrs. Archinard was far from being an ass. She felt the atmosphere with unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be made upon ce type là. She welcomed Katherine’s entrance as a diversion from looming boredom. Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep amethyst color. The high collar and the long sleeves that came over her white hands in points were edged with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of amethysts lightly set in gold encircled the base of her throat. Peter liked to see a well-dressed woman, and Katherine was more than well dressed. In the pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her purple gleams and shadows.
“I am glad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to have you in our little diggings. You are like a bit of England sitting there—a big bit!”