"You could marry Bob Collingham—if you wanted to."
His efforts had become so passionately living that he couldn't afford to look up at her now, even had he wished to do so. He did not so wish, because he knew, still in the spirit, how she would take this announcement—without the change of a muscle, without a change of any kind beyond a flame in the amber depths of the irises. It would be a tawny flame, with an indescribable red in it, and he managed, on the instant, to translate it into paint. The girl on her knees was getting a soul as the lumpish white of the plaster cast was taking on the gleam of ancient, long-worshiped stone.
"And would you advise me to do that?"
The voice had the charm of the well-placed mezzo, the enunciation a melodious precision. Born in Halifax, where she had spent her first twelve years, the English tradition of musical speech, which in that old fortified town makes its last tottering stand on the American continent, had been part of her inheritance.
Still working at his highest pitch of tensity, Wray considered his answer.
"I shouldn't advise you to do that—if I thought about myself."
"Then why say anything about it?"
"Because I thought I ought to put you wise."
"What's the good of that, when I don't like him?"
"Girls often marry men they don't like when they have as much money as he'll have."