A pause; then, "Are you coming up to bed?"
"I shall sleep here."
She had passively despised him, whenever she had thought about him at all in those years of his subservience to her. For the first time she was looking at him with a feeling akin to respect.
"Good night," she murmured sweetly.
"Good night," curtly from him.
The watching servants were astonished at her expression of buoyant good humor, were astounded when she said with careless cheerfulness to the butler, "Thomas, telephone Violette the first thing in the morning to come for those tapestries he brought to-day. Tell him I'll call and explain."
XVIII
ARMSTRONG PROPOSES
Armstrong lingered in the entrance to the apartment house where Neva lived, dejection and irritation plain upon his features. At no time since he met her at Trafford's had he so longed to see her; and the elevator boy had just told him she was out. The boy's manner was convincing, but Armstrong was supersensitive about Neva.
She had received him often, and was always friendly; but always with a reserve, the more disquieting for its elusiveness. And whenever he tried to see her and failed, he suspected her of being unwilling to admit him. Sometimes the suspicion took the form of a belief it was a tête-à-tête with the painter which she would not let him interrupt. Again, he feared she had decided not to admit him any more. It would be difficult to say which made him the gloomier—the feeling that he was, at best, a distant second, or the feeling that he was not placed at all. Never before in his relation with any human being, man or woman, had he been so exasperatingly at a disadvantage as with her. The fact that they had been married, which apparently ought to have made it impossible for her to maintain any barrier of reserve against him, once she had accepted him as a friend, was somehow just the circumstance that prevented him from making any progress whatever with her. And this was highly exasperating to a man of his instinct and passion and ability for conquest and dominion over all about him, men as well as women.