“I don’t know why,” she replied. “There doesn’t seem to be any good reason. I’ve thought I would several times. And then—well, I just couldn’t.”
Howard turned the subject and tried to draw her out of this mood. They sat there for several hours and became well acquainted. He found that she had an intelligent way of looking at things, that she observed closely, and that she appreciated and understood far more than he had expected.
It was the beginning of a series of evenings spent together. He took her with him on many of his assignments and they often dined together at “Le Chat Noir” or the “Restaurant de Paris,” or “The Manhattan” over in Second Avenue. Late in June she bought a new gown—a pale-grey with ribbons and hat to match. Howard was amused at the anxious expression in her gold-brown eyes as she waited for his opinion. And when he said: “Well, well, I never saw you look so pretty,” she looked much prettier with a slight colour rising to tint the usual pallor of her cheeks.
One Sunday he came home in the afternoon and found her helping the maid at straightening his rooms. As he lay on the lounge smoking he watched her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on the subject of political economy.
“What do you have such stupid things around for?” she said, smiling and rising. She began to arrange the books and papers on the table. He was looking at her but thinking of something else when he became conscious that she had got suddenly white to the lips. He jumped to his feet.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, “are you going to faint?”
Her eyes were shining as with fever out of a ghostly face. Her lips trembled as she answered: “Oh it’s nothing. I do this often.” She went slowly into the back room where the maid was. In a few minutes she returned, apparently as usual. She flitted about uneasily, taking up now one thing, now another in a purposeless, nervous way.
“I never was in here before,” she said. “You’ve got lots of pretty things. Whose picture is this?”
“That? Oh, my sister-in-law out in Chicago.”
Howard did not then understand why she became so gay, why her eyes danced with happiness, why as soon as she went into the hall she began to sing and kept it up in her own room, quieting down only to burst forth again. He did not even especially note the swift change, the, for her, extraordinary mood of high spirits. It was about this time that their relations began to change.