“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the question. A sphere—a woman’s sphere, of course, which is nearly as objectionable a beast as a lady’s man.”
“You do talk rot sometimes,” said Arthur.
“Don’t you ever have fancies?” she demanded, mockingly.
“Yes, of course, but practical fancies.”
“Practical fancies,” Sylvia echoed. “Oh, my dear, it sounds like a fairy in Jaeger combinations! You don’t know what fun it is talking rot to you, Arthur. It’s like hoaxing a chicken with marbles. You walk away from my conversation with just the same disgusted dignity.”
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Arthur proclaimed. “You’re just the same as you were at fifteen.”
Sylvia, who had been teasing him with a breath of malice, was penitent at once; after all, he had once run away with her, and it would be difficult for any woman of twenty-eight not to rejoice a little at the implication of thirteen undestructive years.
“That last remark was like a cocoanut thrown by a monkey from the top of the cocoanut-palm,” she said. “You meant it to be crushing, but it was crushed instead, and quite deliciously sweet inside.”
All the time that Sylvia had been talking so lightly, while the train was getting nearer and nearer to New York, there had lain at the back of her mind the insistent problem of her relationship to Arthur. The impossibility of their going on together as friends and nothing more had been firmly fixed upon her consciousness for a long time now, and the reason of this was to be sought for less in Arthur than in herself. So far they had preserved all the outward semblances of friendship, but she knew that one look from her eyes deep into his would transform him into her lover. She gave Arthur credit for telling himself quite sincerely that it would be “caddish” to make love to her while he remained under what he would consider a grave obligation; and because with his temperament it would be as much in the ordinary routine of the day to make love to a woman as to dress himself in the morning. She praised his decorum and was really half grateful to him for managing to keep his balance on the very small pedestal that she had provided. She might fairly presume, too, that if she let Arthur fall in love with her he would wish to marry her. Why should she not marry him? It was impossible to answer without accusing herself of a cynicism that she was far from feeling, yet without which she could not explain even to herself her quite definite repulsion from the idea of marrying him. The future, really, now, the very immediate future, must be flung to chance; it was hopeless to arrogate to her forethought the determination of it; besides, here was New York already.
“We’d better go to my old hotel,” Sylvia suggested. Was it the reflection of her own perplexity, or did she detect in Arthur’s accents a note of relief, as if he too had been watching the Palisades of the Hudson and speculating upon the far horizon they concealed?