"Why," he inquired, puzzled, as he gazed at the face still moist with its recent tears and now rather cryptic in its expression, "are your laws of judgment different for me than for other men?"
Marcia shook her head.
"Perhaps just because you are yourself different from other men. Maybe in the artist there is something of the woman and something of the child, as well as something of the man. One doesn't grow angry with a child."
"Oh!" The monosyllable came with an undernote of chagrin. "I'm not exactly responsible. That's what you mean?"
She did not answer in words, but her eyes as she looked off through the drizzle with her fingers hanging limply motionless at her sides gave him the affirmative reply, and he went on in a low voice.
"Of course, that would make you hate me. It must make anyone hate me if it's true."
There was a moment's silence and he heard her laugh. It was a sound of a single note and it was neither a laugh of amusement nor of ridicule. If there was any betrayal of laughing at the expense of someone, the someone was evidently herself, and Paul was not sure it was a laugh after all. Possibly it was a single sob or half-sob and half-laugh. But she went on in a voice flattened by weariness.
"Life deals in paradoxes. Possibly that very thing might make one love you."
Paul stood in the small room, feeling himself very small and contemptible. The face of Loraine rose before his memory, beautiful and petulant, appealing and regal, features of ivory with poppy-like lips, dominated by dusky eyes and night-black hair.
Suddenly she seemed responsible for all his uncertainties. He saw her just then as a Circe. He was a man, swung to an ebb and flow of mood by influences outwardly as nebulous as moon-mists. Just now the influence of Loraine Haswell was at ebb-tide. Tomorrow it might run again to flood, but Paul Burton obeyed the prompting of the present.