Marian uncurled herself gracefully. “Papa is cross,” she observed, with a laugh. “It is only three o’clock, you see. He does not approve of early afternoon. Let’s go to the library, Stacey. I don’t like this room.” And she danced off up the stairs, he following.
She half knelt on a window-seat in the library and gazed out, her mood seeming to change suddenly from hard to soft.
“The clouds drift and drift,” she said dreamily. “And sometimes they’re majestic and white with purple shadows, as now, and sometimes they’re black and terrible, and sometimes mere little pale ghosts of clouds. But they’re always clouds. They haven’t anything to do with real majesty or terror or ghosts. (Can one say ‘real ghosts,’ Stacey?) Only clouds. They just drift and drift. I think I’d like to be a cloud.”
“Why shouldn’t you want to?” he observed callously, “It’s your father’s theory all over again.”
She whirled around, her face mischievous. “Oh, how funny you are, Stacey! You won’t care for me any more. You’ll damn anything I do or say. You’re an enemy, out and out,—oh, yes, you are! Yet you’d be glad enough to kiss me this very minute.”
“Yes,” he admitted angrily.
“But you’re not going to,” she said, with haughtiness. “Not now or ever.” She smiled. “Ames Price is coming to see me to-night. Shall I let him kiss me? It would make him so happy. I think it’s my duty to. Come! Let’s sit down and talk of duty, Stacey.”
And so she kept it up, as full of witchery as Circe, dazzling in the bright rapid flash of her moods, swift and lovely as a swallow, soft at one moment and clouded,—brilliant and gemlike the next.
Yet, through it all, Stacey, though he talked freely enough, was cold, distant and bored. He was like a man idly watching a sorceress draw circles and pentagons in the sand and murmur incantations. No spirits responded. No enchantment ensued. It was merely laborious lines and words, silly child’s play. The only thing that interested him—a little—in the performance was the question of whether or not it was deliberate.
Stacey had continued to go daily to see Marian. He remained unmoved by almost everything in her that had formerly delighted him. There was no longer any magic, any mystery. Yet he desired to be near her. Something she did give him. But as to what it was he did not inquire.