"Yes; and I have so much, so much to tell you about it. It is all wonderful, and all beautiful."
She looked at him, startled. Her whole rapt face caught fire, and for a moment was suffused with a great light. Only in animals and wild things had he ever before seen that strange phosphorescence of the eyes.
Then she looked into his face once more, and all the color went out of her own. She saw her mistake.
"But which, which?" she cried in sudden anguish, under her breath. At first he did not understand. Then slowly he came to see just what she meant.
"The Silver Poppy," he answered her, wondering.
She put her four bent finger-tips up to her parted lips with a sudden odd little gesture, as though she was thrusting and holding back some involuntary small cry. It seemed a movement of both disappointment and despair.
It was all over in a minute, and before Hartley could realize why it was done, or what it had meant, the same stream that had borne him in to her as relentlessly had carried him away. Ebbing into flushed but cooler diffuseness, it left him in another room, where he beheld rustling, laughing groups of women, and palms, and heard the sounds of muffled music and broken snatches of talk.
He looked back toward Cordelia and tried to catch a glimpse of her, but a sea of plumed heads waved between them.
"But life is only a vaudeville, with hunger and love for top-liners," he heard a gaunt tragedian disclaiming to a woman with penciled eyebrows and obviously rouged cheeks and lips.
"Yes, but think how many times we can love!" the rouged lips laughed back at him. Hartley moved on through the crush.