She paused astonished. She had expected a temporary sort of structure. Before her rose a fitting temple for the mysteries of the "black art." It was a long two-story building of stone and brick, not visible from the lake proper because it stood upon the bank of a deep, narrow inlet. The weather had stained its walls into the semblance of age wherever they showed through the heavy mantle of bitter-sweet that overspread even the roof. Around the place hung an air of aloofness and seclusion, of mystery, that appealed to her young instinct for the romantic. The brick path divided into two. One went to what was obviously the entrance to the second-story bachelor suite; the other turned to the left, rounded the corner of the house, ended at the massive iron door of the laboratory proper.
This door was wide open. Courtney stood upon the threshold like a bright bird peering from the sunshine into the entrance to a cave. The air that came out was heavy with the odors of chemicals, but not sharp or especially unpleasant. Besides, in high school and college she had done a good deal at chemistry, enough to be seized of its fascination. She stood gazing into a big high-ceilinged room, filled with a bewildering variety of unusual articles—gigantic bottles, cylinders, vials, jars of glass, of stone, of metal; huge retorts with coils of pipe, lead and rubber; lamps and balances and mortars; tiers on tiers of crowded shelves of glass and porcelain and iron; drying ovens, distilling apparatus, condensers and generators, crushers and pulverizers, cupels and cupel trays, calorimeters and crucibles and microscopes; floor all but filled with batteries and engines and machines of gold and platinum, of aluminum and copper, of brass and steel and glass and nickel. A thousand articles, in the orderly confusion that indicates constant use.
She was more and more amazed as she stared and reflected. "He works with all these things!" thought she, depressed for no clear reason. "I had no idea—no idea!"
She ventured a step farther. In a twinkling her expression of wonder and vague pain vanished before a love light that seemed to stream not from her face only, but from her whole body, with those rare eyes of hers as radiating centers. She was seeing Richard—near a window, so standing that his long high-bred face was in profile to her. He was tall, well above six feet; his careless flannels revealed the strong, slender, narrow form of the pioneers and their pure-blooded descendants. His fairish hair was thick and wavy—"Thank Heaven, not curly!" thought Courtney.
She did not interrupt. She preferred to watch him, to let her glance caress him, all unconscious of her presence. In one hand he was balancing a huge bottle; the other held a long test tube. He was slowly dropping the bottle's contents of quiet colorless liquid into the test tube, which was half full of a liquid, also quiet and colorless. Each drop as it touched the surface of the liquid dissolved into black steam. It was this steam that gave off the pungent odor. As she watched, there came a slow tightening at her throat, at her heart.
"I never saw him look like this," thought she. No, it wasn't his serious intentness; one of the things she had first noted about him, and best loved, was the seriousness of his deep-set dark gray eyes—the look of the man who "amounts to something," and would prove it before he got through. No, it was the kind of seriousness. She felt she was seeing a Richard Vaughan she did not know at all. "But, then," she reflected, "there's a side of me he doesn't know about either." This, however, did not satisfy her. The man she was now seeing disquietingly suggested that the Richard Vaughan she had been knowing and loving and had been loved by was not the real man at all, but only one of his moods. "I thought he just amused himself with chemistry. Instead— Nanny is about right." A pang shot through her; she would have recognized it as jealousy, had she stopped to think. But at nineteen one does not stop to think. "I do believe he cares almost as much for this as he does for me."
He lowered the bottle to the table. As he straightened up, he caught sight of her. His expression changed; but the change was not nearly enough either in degree or in kind to satisfy her. "Hello!" cried he carelessly. "Good morning."
She got ready to be kissed. But, instead of coming toward her, he half turned away, to hold the test tube up between his eyes and the light. "Um—mm," he grumbled, shaking it again and again, and each time looking disappointedly at the unchanged liquid.
Like all American girls of the classes that shelter their women, she had been brought up to accept as genuine the pretense of superhuman respect and deference the American man—usually in all honesty—affects toward woman—until he marries her, or for whatever reason becomes tired and truthful. She had been confirmed in these ideas of man as woman's incessant courtier, almost servant, by receiving for the last five lively years the admiration, exaggerated and ardent, which physical charm, so long as it is potent, exacts from the male. No more than other women of her age—or than older women—or than the men had she penetrated the deceptive surface of things and discovered beneath "chivalry's" smug meaningless professions the reality, the forbearance of "strength" with "weakness," the graciousness of superior for inferior. Thus, such treatment as this of Dick's would have been humiliating from a casual man, on a casual occasion. From her husband, her lover, the man she had just been garlanding with all the fairest flowers of her ardent young heart—from him, and on this "first" morning, this unconcern, which Nanny's talk enabled her to understand, was worse than stab into feminine vanity; it was stab straight into her inmost self, the seat of her life.
She dared not admit the wound—not to her own secret thought. Bravely she struggled until her voice and manner were under control. "I've come to take you to breakfast," said she. It seemed to her that her tone was gratifying evidence of triumph of strength of character over "silly supersensitiveness—as if Dick could mean to hurt me!"