But, to my surprise, she took my sarcasm, if sarcasm it was, in good part.
“This apparition is of your own invoking,” she said. “And I did not want to deny you that pride in yourself which you had a right to feel. The strange comrade who has come to you out of the shadows is, after all, only your own lay-figure, Cousin; and—and the dress is very pretty.”
I glanced at her in some astonishment. Her cheeks were flushed, and she trifled with the food on her plate.
“So spake the young rosebud of its sheath,” I said, with a laugh. “Now I am going to fill up your glass.”
She let me do it; she was fond, in moderation, of sweet wine, was Fifine; and somehow I liked to see her lips and the “blushful Hippocrene” meet in small kisses—there was a suggestion of pure Paganism in that contact, of nymphs that thought no sin of tasting the good earth’s love.
We made a passable meal of it, between smalltalk and persiflage, always in the abstract sense. I accepted things as they had come to me, and, save to ascertain that my guest’s privacy had not been interrupted in any way during my absence, asked no leading questions and invited no confidences. That would have been to spoil all the romantic glamour of the situation; and moreover I should not have expected the truth. Since we were reconciled in the matter of social equality, I was prepared, for my comfort, to drift, and suffer or enjoy the charge the gods had put upon me. I came to do both, in fact, but with ever a leaning towards the contented side. And so Fifine and I became comrades.
CHAPTER V
That evening after dinner I deliberately tempted the Providence which had offered me Fifine as a mild mental stimulant. There were several of my paintings hanging on the walls of the sitting-room, and, when I followed her in thither, I found her standing meditatively, cigarette in hand, before one of them. I came and stood behind her.
“Ah!” I said, “that is one of the things in which I successfully hid from you what my choice of your dress revealed.”
She turned and looked me quite frankly and coolly in the face.