“You are different from most of the landlords in whose houses I have lived,” she said. “That is the primary consideration. I thought I would explain to you that the alterations I should like to make will not affect other tenants, as I have every wish and hope, be my life long or short, to spend it here.”
He looked at her in unaffected wonder, thinking to himself that it could be no ordinary sorrow that caused so young and lovely a woman to spend her life in seclusion. He had rarely, if ever, seen a more beautiful woman. She was tall, with a finely formed figure, full of gracious, graceful curves, that made every movement seem like a note of richest harmony. She had a lovely Spanish face, dark, beautiful, dreamy, but inexpressibly sad; there were purple rings around her dark eyes, as though she wept much and watched more; there was no light in the faint, sad smile that rippled over her lips. As one sees sometimes a perfect flower, over which saddest blight has fallen, so was she blighted in her youth, in her beauty, by some terrible sorrow, the nature of which no one could guess from her face.
He was thinking intently of her, wondering so deeply what her history was, that he was not aware that she had spoken to him twice without receiving any answer. When he discovered it, for the second time during the interview, his face flushed hotly at his own awkwardness. He tried to bring the interview to a more businesslike conclusion.
“I am afraid, Mrs. Payton,” he said, “that you find me very stupid. I had a dreadful trouble years ago, and it has made me unlike every one else.”
He saw a gleam of kindly sympathy light up her dark eyes.
“Trouble?” she repeated, wearily. “I think every one in the wide world has that. I never hear of anything else. Trouble? I ask myself sometimes why we were created to do nothing save suffer. Do you remember those lines of Barry Cornwall’s?
“We toil through pain and wrong;
We fight and fly;
We have, we love, and then ere long
Stone dead we lie.