"Then you are her guest at present?"
"Mrs. Spaulding has asked me to live with her, for the winter, at any rate. She was more than kind, when I came, about fixing up this little den for me to work in. You can see, she has made me only too comfortable."
Hartley looked at her, puzzled.
"It's hard to work—in some places." She walked to the window and was looking out when next she spoke. "And I want to be free."
He thought that he understood, and he would have drawn back from any more intimate prying into an unfortunate environment, but Cordelia herself spoke on:
"Mrs. Spaulding, of course, has not exactly the artistic temperament, but she is the soul of goodness, and has wealth and position, and when she asked me to come with her, I was only too glad to have a real friend, and a friend who could be a sort of social patroness as well."
"After all, the patron is not the poor figure that history has made him out to be, do you think?" asked the young Oxford man, busy with his note-book. Yet it seemed one of life's keenest small ironies that out of such pale-tinted atmospheres should come the volumes which the turgid, hurrying, surging world was so ready to devour. It was no wonder, he felt, that she wanted to be free.
"It sounds odd to you, I suppose?" she went on. "But that's because you're an outsider. Here in New York you'll find plenty such persons, anxious enough to shine in the reflected light of the real workers. Mrs. Spaulding is different from the rest—she would be as true as steel, I know. But the ordinary kind are not easy to hold. Their whims change, and you have to change with them. They take you up just as they'd take up a new design in foulards, or a novelty in their stationery, or a new breed of Pomeranian. We all have our hobbies, you know," she added, with just the slightest touch of bitterness in her voice.
"But you have been particularly happy," said her visitor, sweeping the expensively and tastefully furnished study with his quick eye. Then he wondered, as he looked at her, if already she was tired of publicity.
"It's nice to be free," she sighed, as in answer to his glance.