"And you can hold people and make them like you," she went on. "And you aren't afraid to show people that you care for them."
It was Cordelia's turn to drive trouble from a softly rebellious breast.
"If he only guessed how sweet and good you are, some wise man I know would surely come and run off with you."
Mrs. Spaulding looked at her tragically and heaved a ponderous sigh. Then her American saving sense of humor came to her rescue and she clung to it, like the drowning to a raft.
"I'm a sentimental old fool, my dear," was all she said. And Cordelia was left to her own troubled thoughts.
More than once the author of The Silver Poppy had been heard to say that she was a greatly misjudged woman. The world accepted her as austere and impassive. The myriad readers of her book thought of her as clever but chilly, as talented but retiring. Yet "upon the stern and somber loom of passion and love," her publisher's announcement had read, "the girlish hand of this fair daughter of Dixie has wielded a shuttle wound with the odorous warmth of the Southland and dyed with the bright fancy of one who has loved and known and suffered. From the story of one woman's tenderest devotion and one man's deepest love this young hand has intuitively woven the magic woof of many-hued romance."
Precisely what it meant no one attempted to define, but it sounded very well, and what was more, it seemed to hint that the pale young authoress from the hills of Kentucky had once known her own romance of the heart, and that the gates of feeling had thereafter been closed to all supplicants. This was a deduction so natural that the elderly maiden lady who conducted a column of society chatter on one of the back pages of a daily newspaper had even ventured to print—this was after a very substantial dinner at Sherry's, where-at Cordelia herself was the gracious and generous hostess—that many a stout heart of Manhattan had reason to lament the fact that the feelings of a certain golden-haired daughter of Kentucky were impregnable to all assault. The lady, indeed, was so closely allied to literature that, unlike the philosopher of the Rubaiyat, she could never be divorced from barren reason and make a second marriage. This was all put with a slyness so adroit and yet with an application so undoubted that it had once more been whispered about that the beautiful young Kentucky genius preferred great dreams to Dan Cupid. Her studious maiden-hood seemed hedged about by a bulwark of half-written books. It was a sad example of beauty sacrificed on the altar of bookishness.
And yet, it was argued, this precocious child of letters at some time during her career must have learned to love, and love deeply; one critic declared her pen to have been dipped not in ink, but "in the ruddy flood of a warm and palpitating heart." If, in truth, she had never loved, how, then, had that fluent pen of hers ever learned to write so movingly and so masterfully of the divine passion?
How, indeed? That was the riddle which more than one puzzled mind had to leave unread. That was a thought, too, that had troubled Hartley not a little; there were times when he felt vaguely envious of that unknown, mysterious, shrouded past. He had read also that Cordelia had declared that she could never marry, that devotion to her art precluded any such worldly consummation. It had even crept into print that Iscaro, the Egyptian palmist, had sealed her girlhood decision by prophesying that she was to achieve immortality only through a life of celibacy.
Yet such are the cross-threads of fate. For Hartley, puzzling over these things as others before him had done, had built up in his consciousness an incongruous, self-contradictory, impossible character of a woman who seemed to him always warm to the eye and was yet destined to prove marble cold to the touch.