She looked at him keenly for a moment or two as he told her he would like to feel that he was doing something for her father; the fleeting shadow of a fear crossed her face.
"No," she said, "let's have our morning together in the Park."
There was already a premonitory touch of autumn in the bright air. They passed through the dazzling, sunlit Plaza and entered the cool, green quietness of the Park itself. There the noises of the city faded down to a quiet rumble and the perfume of flowers and the smell of verdure took the place of the drifting street dust. There was something so detached, and pictorial, and spectacular about it that it seemed to Hartley as if a mental tourniquet was already holding dreamily back life's wasting energies. The legato of hoofs, persistent and smooth as a waterfall, the tinkle and clatter of chains, the gloss and luster of the rumbling carriages, the shimmer and gleam of the flanks of perfect horses, the passing faces—proud, young, pale, flushed, weary, eager faces of women—the color and flash of millinery and gown against the cool dark greenness; it seemed to him the sheltered and alluring flowering of life, the quietness and repose of the twilight of accomplishment, never virginal and unconscious, but studied, autumnal, attained. It seemed to him a splendor unmellowed and unsoftened by age, not as it might have been in his own land.
Turning to the silent girl at his side, he spoke of the difference between Central Park and the avenues of Hyde Park of an early summer afternoon. He tried to describe to her the forsaken aspect of London's West End during August and the first part of September, when the fashionable world of his own land was, as it were, closed for repairs. He told her of the forlornness of the Drive and the Row, and how at that season only summer tourists invaded Hyde Park, and even then only north of the Serpentine.
Cordelia listened to him, contented and happy—listened almost raptly, as though she was making the most of her day. It was not until he had rambled joyously on and described to her a London summer and the advent of what they called "the silly season" that she asked him a pointed question or two about English scenery and English country life. She had always been greatly puzzled about the peerage, she confessed, and wanted to know why one was just the Countess of Somebody at one time and then Lady Somebody at another. She had met Lady Aberdeen once, in Chicago, she said, at an Irish-lace store there. She had been afraid to say a word to her, she confessed prettily, because she hadn't known just how to address her. And were all the upper classes as simple and unaffected as Lady Aberdeen? And was London so different from New York? And would she ever, she wondered, see the Old Country, and Oxford, and all the other beautiful places he had spoken of? And she asked him if he could believe that at one time she had hated England, and everything English—hated it blindly—which is the worst of all hatreds.
Hartley tried to paint before her eyes the panorama of London from Waterloo Bridge, with its imperial sweep and mass of river front huddling from the Houses of Parliament to the Tower. He tried to make her feel the sober, low-hung English sky, the softened lights, and the more ordered and solemn lines of London's architecture, where New York's almost universal newness of things was not to be found, and where the dry, hard tones of the New World's brown-stone fronts were likewise happily absent.
She listened intently, and some of her questions were so innocently childlike, and were asked with such a winning ingenuousness that he laughed now and then. It was not until he had finished that she confessed the real cause of her dilemma.
"You see, the book I've been working on so long is partly laid in London, and of course I've never been there. And when you haven't even passed through a place on a train it's pretty hard to get the right local color, isn't it?"
Hartley assumed that it was.
"And I've tried reading it up, but it's no use. I'm afraid I haven't the absorbent mind; some people come out of a book, you see, like a spaniel out of water, scattering a shower of ideas all over you. Well, I can't do that; and what makes it so much harder for me," she added plaintively, "I've known so few nice Englishmen."