Odd shifted his position uncomfortably.
“That may be shyness, reserve, inability for self-expression.” He leaned his arm on the mantelpiece and studied the fire with a puzzled frown. “That exquisite face must mean something.”
“I don’t know. By the law of compensation Katherine has the brains, the heart, and Hilda the beauty. I didn’t find her shy. She seemed perfectly mistress of herself. It may be a case of absorption in her love affair, as you say. I am not sure that he has asked her yet. He is a most modest lover.”
Mary saw a great deal of Katherine during her stay, and her first impression was strengthened.
Katherine shopped with her; they considered gowns together. Katherine’s taste was exquisite, and the bonnets of her choice the most becoming Mrs. Apswith had ever worn. The girl was not above liking pretty things—that was already nice in her—for the girl was clever enough to pose indifference. Mary saw at once that she was clever. Katherine was very independent, but very attentive. Her sincerity was charmingly gay, and not priggish. She said just what she thought; but she thought things that were worth saying. She made little display of learning, but one felt it—like the silk lining in a plain serge gown. She did not talk too much; she made Mrs. Apswith feel like talking. Mary took her twice to the play with Peter and herself. Hilda was once invited and came. Odd sat in the back of the box and watched for the effect on her face of the clever play interpreted by the best talent of the Théâtre Français. The quiet absorption of her look might imply much intelligent appreciation; but Katherine’s little ripples of glad enjoyment, clever little thrusts of criticism, made Hilda’s silence seem peculiarly impassive, and while between the acts Katherine analyzed keenly, woke a scintillating sense of intellectual enjoyment about her in flashes of gay discussion, Hilda sat listening with that same smile of admiration that almost irritated Odd by its seeming acceptance of inability—inferiority.
The smile, from its very lack of all self-reference, was rather touching; and Mary owned that Hilda was “sweet,” but the adjective did not mitigate the former severity of judgment—that was definite.
When Mary went, she begged Katherine to accept the prettiest gown Doucet could make her, and Katherine accepted with graceful ease and frankness. The gown was exquisite. Mary sent to Hilda a fine Braun photograph, which Hilda received with surprised delight, for she had done nothing to make Mrs. Apswith’s stay in Paris pleasant. She thought such kindness touching, and Katherine’s gown the loveliest she had ever seen.
CHAPTER V
MARY gone, the bicycling tête-à-têtes were resumed, and Odd, too, began to call more frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. They were bon camarades in the best sense of the term, and Peter found it a very pleasant sense. He realized that he had been lonely, and loneliness in his present désœuvrée condition would have been intolerable. The melancholy of laziness could not creep to him while this girl laughed beside him. The frank, sympathetic relation—almost that of man to man—was untouched by the faintest infusion of sentiment; delicious breeziness and freedom of intercourse was the result. Peter listened to Katherine, laughed at her sometimes, and liked her to laugh at him. He told her a good many of his thoughts; she criticised them, approved of them, encouraged him to action. But Odd felt his present contemplativeness too wide to be limited by any affirmation. He had never felt so little sure of anything nor so conscious of everything in general. Writing in such a mood seemed folly, and he continued to drift. He still read in an objectless way at the Bibliothèque, hunting out old references, pleasing himself by a circuit through the points of view of all times. Katherine offered to help him, and in the morning he would bring her his notes to look over; her quick comprehension formed another link. He was very sorry for Katherine too. She had no taste for drifting. In her eye he read a dissatisfaction, a thirst for wider vision, wider action, a restless impatience with the narrowness, the ineffectiveness of her lot, that made him muse on her probable future with a sense of pathos. Hilda’s wide gaze showed no such rebellion with the actual; her art had filled it with a distant content that shut strife and the defeat of yearnings from her: or was it merely the placid consciousness of Allan Hope—a future assured and fully satisfactory? Under Katherine’s gayety there was a fierce beating of caged wings, and Odd fancied at times that, freed, the imprisoned birds might be strong and beautiful. He fancied this especially when she played to him; she played well, with surprising sureness of taste, and, as the winter came and it grew too cold for bicycling, Peter often spent the morning in listening to her. Mrs. Archinard did not appear until the afternoon in the drawing-room, and in the evenings he usually met her dining out or at some reception; their intimacy once noticed, they were invited together. Lady—— was especially anxious that Odd should have every opportunity for meeting her favorite.
But with all this intimacy, to Peter’s consciousness thoroughly, paternally platonic, under all its daily interests and quiet pleasure lay a half-felt hurt, a sense of injury and loss. The little voice, seldom thought of during the last ten years, now repeated often: “But you will be different; I will be different; we will both be changed.”