“I’m never cross with life.”
“Only with me, then?”
“Only with you, to-day.”
Mayburn, folding his slice of bread-and-butter, took her harshness with Apollonian serenity. “At least let me know that I’ve an ally in you,” he appealed to Gavan, while Eppie refilled her cup with the business-like air of stoking an engine that paused for a moment near wayside trivialities.
Gavan had listened to the dithyrambics with some uneasiness, conscious of Eppie’s observation, and now owned that he felt little interest in the Eternal Goya.
“Don’t, don’t, I pray of you, let him take the color out of life for you,” Mayburn pleaded, turning from this rebuff, tea-cup in hand, to Eppie; and Eppie, with a rather grim smile, again full of reminiscences for Gavan, declared that neither of them could take anything out of it for her.
She kept, after that, the talk in pleasant enough shallows; but Mayburn fancied, more than once, that he heard the grating of his keel on an unpropitious shore. Eppie didn’t want him to-day, that was becoming evident; she wasn’t going to push him off into decorative sailing. And presently, wondering a little if his tact had already been too long at fault, wondering anew about the degree of intimacy between the childhood friends, who had, evidently, secrets in which he did not share, he gracefully departed.
Eppie leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and closed her eyes as though to give herself the relief of a long silence.
Her hair softly silhouetted against the green shade and the flickering illumination of the firelight upon her, her passive face showed a stern wistfulness. Things had gone wrong with her.
Looking at her, Gavan’s memory went back to the last time they had been together, alone, in firelight, to his impulse and her startlingly acute interpretation of it. Her very aspect now, her closed eyes and folded arms, seemed to show him how completely she disowned, for both of them, even the memory of such an unfitting episode. More keenly than ever he recognized the fineness in her, the generosity, the willingness to outlive trifles, to put them away forever; and the contagion of her somber peace enveloped him.