"If you really want to come—" said Dick, reluctant. "I suppose—after what I've said— Well, you can come for a few days."
Courtney was looking into the fire. Not for a "few days" but for as long as Basil worked with those dangerous chemicals. If anything happened—they would be together. Richard was looking at her; but he thought it was the fire light that was giving her the strange, somehow terrible expression which yet enhanced her beauty and her charm.
"How serious you look," said he. "Really, quite tragic—in that light."
"Yes, it must be the way the light falls," replied she. "Or is it because I've mislaid my pet powder rag?"
Next morning as soon as Courtney dispatched her household routine she went down to the Smoke House and appeared before Richard in his laboratory for the first time since that morning after the homecoming, long, long ago in that other life. With a platinum rod he was slowly stirring some fiery mixture of a dark purple color in a big iron crucible. She saw that the fumes were poisonous, as his nose and mouth were protected by a respirator. As on the previous visit she stood silent in the doorway watching him. She had long since passed the stage of comparisons and contrasts; and her mind was altogether upon the present and the future, as an intelligent young mind is extremely apt to be. So, she was not thinking of that previous visit, but was simply interested in what he was doing—in his work, which she had now resolved, with an experienced woman's determination, to make her own work also, no matter what opposition she might encounter. Her achievements in house and gardens, in bringing up Winchie, in breaking through the barriers of moral convention so powerful round a woman born and bred as she had been—these feats had wonderfully developed her will, had replaced shyness and timidity with quiet self-confidence.
When the contents of the crucible cooled and he took off the respirator, she spoke. "I see you've run up a partition."
He glanced at her with a frown—not severe but irritated, as at the persistent naughtiness of a sweet and charming child. "Oh, you've come—have you? ... Yes—the partition gives Basil and me each his own shop. I like to work alone, whenever it's possible."
She advanced calmly, indifferent to his unfriendliness. "Then you don't want me to help you?" She put all her diplomacy of tone and manner into that little speech. She knew how much depended upon this "entering wedge"—this getting tolerated within those walls.
"What a whimsical creature you are!" Dick was still vexed, but half laughing, too. She was so delicate and graceful, so fascinating to the eye; and she seemed to him absurdly, quaintly out of place there. "Basil!" he called. "Gallatin!"
Gallatin, in a blouse, rubber apron and gloves appeared from the other part of the shop.