She felt Brent's gaze upon her—that unfathomable look which made her uneasy, yet was somehow satisfying, too. He said, after a while, "Palmer is to give me his photograph. Will you give me yours?" He was smiling. "Both of you belong in my gallery."
"Of course she will," said Palmer, coming out on the balcony and standing beside her. "I want her to have some taken right away—in the evening dress she wore to the Opera last week. And she must have her portrait painted."
"When we are settled," said Susan. "I've no time for anything now but shopping."
They had come to inspect the apartment above Brent's, and had decided to take it; Susan saw possibilities of making it over into the sort of environment of which she had dreamed. In novels the descriptions of interiors, which weary most readers, interested her more than story or characters. In her days of abject poverty she used these word paintings to construct for herself a room, suites of rooms, a whole house, to replace, when her physical eyes closed and her eyes of fancy opened wide, the squalid and nauseous cell to which poverty condemned her. In the streets she would sometimes pause before a shop window display of interior furnishings; a beautiful table or chair, a design in wall or floor covering had caught her eyes, had set her to dreaming—dreaming on and on—she in dingy skirt and leaky shoes. Now—the chance to realize her dreams had come. Palmer had got acquainted with some high-class sports, American, French and English, at an American bar in the rue Volney. He was spending his afternoons and some of his evenings with them—in the evenings winning large sums from them at cards at which he was now as lucky as at everything else. Palmer, pleased by Brent's manner toward Susan—formal politeness, indifference to sex—was glad to have him go about with her. Also Palmer was one of those men who not merely imagine they read human nature but actually can read it. He knew he could trust Susan. And it had been his habit—as it is the habit of all successful men—to trust human beings, each one up to his capacity for resisting temptation to treachery.
"Brent doesn't care for women—as women," said he. "He never did. Don't you think he's queer?"
"He's different," replied Susan. "He doesn't care much for people—to have them as intimates. I understand why. Love and friendship bore one—or fail one—and are unsatisfactory—and disturbing. But if one centers one's life about things—books, pictures, art, a career—why, one is never bored or betrayed. He has solved the secret of happiness, I think."
"Do you think a woman could fall in love with him?" he asked, with an air of the accidental and casual.
"If you mean, could I fall in love with him," said she, "I should say no. I think it would either amuse or annoy him to find that a woman cared about him."
"Amuse him most of all," said Palmer. "He knows the ladies—that they love us men for what we can give them."
"Did you ever hear of anyone, man or woman, who cared about a person who couldn't give them anything?"