"What a sensitive creature she is!" was the reminiscent conclusion of the builder after the first glance round. A less keen observer might have detected a nature as delicately balanced as an aspen leaf in the subtle appreciation of harmony and contrast, of light and shade. And there were none of the showy, shallow tricks of the poseur; for, the room was plain, as a serious worker always insists on having his surroundings. It appeared in the hanging of the few pictures, in the colors of the few rugs and draperies, of walls, ceiling, furniture, in the absence of anything that was not pleasing; the things that are not in a room speak as eloquently of its tenant as do the things that are there.
"Not a scrap of her own work," thought Narcisse, with a smile for the shyness that omission hinted.
"Pardon my keeping you waiting," apologized Neva, entering in her long, brown blouse with stains of paint. "I was at work when you were announced."
"And you had to hustle everything out of sight, so I'd have no chance to see."
Neva nodded smiling assent. "But I'm better than I used to be. Really, I am. My point of view is changing—rapidly—so rapidly that I wake up each morning a different person from the one who went to bed the night before."
Narcisse was thinking that the Neva before her was as unlike the Neva of their school days as a spring landscape is unlike the same stretch in the bleak monotones of winter. "Getting more confidence in yourself?" suggested she aloud. "Or are you beginning to see that the world is an old fraud whose judgments aren't important enough to make anyone nervous?"
"Both," replied Neva. "But I can't honestly claim to be self-made-over. Boris teaches me a great deal beside painting."
Narcisse changed expression. As they talked on and on—of their work, of the West, of the college and their friendship there, Neva felt that Narcisse had some undercurrent of thought which she was striving with, whether to suppress or express, she could not tell. The conversation drifted back to New York, to Boris. There was something of warning in Narcisse's face, and something of another emotion less clearly defined as she said with a brave effort at the rigidly judicial, "Boris is a great man; but first of all a man. You know what that means when a man is dealing with a woman."
Neva's lip curled slightly. "That side of human nature doesn't interest me."
Narcisse, watching her closely, could not but be convinced that the indifference in her tone was not simulated. "Not yet," she thought. Then, aloud, "That side doesn't often interest a woman until she finds she must choose between becoming interested in it and losing the man altogether."