"Then," she went on to him, "why do you look at me inquiringly?"
"It's your manner," replied he. "You're acting very differently to-day from what you ever did before."
While he was saying it she divined the reason—the letter from Narcisse. The offer from the Coal Products Company had come several weeks before; but that had been got for her. This position in New York was of her own getting. And for the first time in her life she felt like a full-grown personality capable of taking care of herself. Unconsciously her whole outlook upon life changed; the change disclosed itself in her expression, in her voice, in her manner. She handed Richard her patent of nobility, the letter from Narcisse; she watched his face as he read. But she got no clue to his thoughts. As he gave back the letter without comment she said: "I'm in the way to get rid of the reason for a woman's so often wishing she'd been born a man."
"I understand," said he, and turned away to gaze reflectively out of the window.
She went into the rear room to work there. Half an hour later she returned, to find him still staring out over the lake. "I've given him something more to think about," said she to herself, with a sly smile at his back. "And it'll do him good, if ever he starts out to marry again." Yet somehow she was not fully satisfied that her guess covered the whole of what he was thinking. He was extremely puzzling, this polite, appreciative, carefully businesslike Richard.
She was impatient to be gone. She wished to try in longer flight the new wings of freedom and independence she had grown. She felt confident they would sustain her; but she could not be sure until she tried. She had decided for the Siersdorf offer. She liked the chemistry chiefly because, working with Richard at the explorations of hydrogen and nitrogen, she was moving toward a definite high accomplishment—the discovery of a source of happiness to millions—a cheap substitute for coal and wood that would banish that horror of horrors, cold, from the lives of the poor. But it would be quite another thing to work at fabricating new shades of color in dyes, new commercial uses for the by-products of coal; she would be descending from scientist's helper to plodder for a living, from lieutenant of a Columbus to mate on a tramp steamer. Not so, if she went into the Siersdorf office.
There she would remain artist, worker with the fine tools of the imagination. Also Basil's tastes lay in that direction. Fancy is not the air plant that idealists pretend. Its flowers may be spiritual but its roots strike deep into the physical. It may need the sun and the air of heaven, but it needs the soil even more. In the soil it is born; by the soil it chiefly lives. Courtney's fancy was the fancy of a normal human being in whom all the emotions are healthy, ardent, fully developed. It had no long or difficult task in blurring into vagueness whatever marred her memory of her and Basil's romance—or at least in making the blemishes for the time seem unimportant in presence of the rosy, horizon-filling peak moments of their happiness. Once more, from the quiet of her long lonely evenings—hardly the less solitary for Helen's rather monotonous company—arose the longings, the visions, the thrills. She felt that, in her young inexperience, she had been too arrogant in her demands upon life; she had asked more than she could possibly expect from a human love, more than she had any right to expect. But now she was chastened; her point of view was less wildly romantic. What would they not be to each other!—once they were together—and free from all constraint of moral doubts and conventional dreads. It was only natural that in their life of stress passion should have been uppermost, should have become dominant. It was human for Basil to feel that he was contending for even physical possession of her—and until there is physical possession, love has no substantial ground to build upon.
She was eager to be off for New York, to establish her independence, and then to begin her real life on the enduring foundation of equality and comradeship brightened by passion as a tree is brightened by its blossoms and their perfume. But, eager though she was, she could not deny her obligation to remain until Dick's assistant came. She knew now that he had spoken the literal truth when he said he needed her badly. It would be a return for his broad-minded humanity quite beneath her, to leave him in the lurch—especially when carrying on his particular line of experiments meant danger if he had to do all the work alone. She must stay until Carter came. And she was glad of this opportunity to show him that she did appreciate what he had done for her, even though he had done it not for her sake but for his own—in obedience to his sense of the decent and the self-respecting.
So, she worked steadily and interestedly on, just as if the divorce had not yet been entered upon the records of the court as valid and final. She found an unexpected additional source of interest in studying her former husband as an individuality. It is always a novel sensation for a woman with any claim to physical charm to find herself regarded impersonally—sexlessly. That is usually anything but an agreeable sensation; every woman feels the chagrin of failure when she sees that her charms do not charm—this, though she might be disdainful of and resentful of overt tribute to her physical self. Courtney, however, did not in those peculiar circumstances feel sufficiently piqued to try to assert woman's ancient right of dominion over the senses of man. She could enjoy the novelty of being treated like a man, and could study calmly the man who was thus unmindful of what is habitually uppermost in any strongly masculine nature.
At work with Richard alone, she was at last getting acquainted with him. From the beginning of each day at the laboratory to the end, she was receiving a series of vivid impressions of a really superior man—competent, intelligent, resourceful. He thought about himself never; he could not be daunted or baffled. His broad-mindedness was no longer marred by the sex narrowness that had made appreciation of it impossible to her, to any woman of her sort. He knew so much; he carried knowledge so lightly. It seemed to her, after much experience of "learned" men, that knowledge was chiefly power to bore. His knowledge was like a rapier of finest steel skilfully used in his duel with his mysterious masked combatant, the alchemist on guard at nature's secretest laboratory. She felt that he was a man out of a million; yet she had no sense of embarrassed inferiority. This general in the army of exact science, which is the true army of progress, was a democrat, marched with the soldiers afoot, was their equal. "If any woman ever does fall in love with him," thought she, "she will worship him. But—he's too impersonal. We women want something smaller—not a sun star, but a fire on a hearth."