Her question had a plaintive, querulous ring, which the circumstances made something more than pathetic.
"Will you reconsider your refusal?" he said, making the interrogation a reply.
She sank back into her seat again.
"No, never!" she exclaimed.
"Good night," he returned. He went immediately out into the hall, put on his coat and hat, and left the house.
"She will yield," he told himself. "I am sure of it. She showed me that she would if I were only hard enough. I mean to be hard. I can make it up in kindness by and by."
He waited three days. No word came to him from Mrs. Lee. But on the fourth word came to him.
"I knew it," he thought, as he read her note.
Mrs. Lee went to the dinner in a truly marvelous gown. It was some curious blending of crimson and black silks, that made her look sombrely clad in one attitude and luridly clad in the next. Her only jewelry was a thin snake of rubies about her slender throat, and the head of the snake, set directly beneath her chin, was a big gold one, having two large garnets for eyes. All the women pronounced her costume ridiculously overdone. All the men professed to like it. She never appeared in gayer spirits. Next to Claire she was the most notable feminine guest.
But Claire ruled absolute. She had never been more beautiful, perhaps because she had never felt more secretly and victoriously exultant. The delicious music, the piercing yet tender odor of the lavish flowers, the insidious potency of the wines, which she sipped sparingly and felt dangerously tingle through her veins—all these influences wrought upon her a species of stimulating enthrallment which made the whole splendid banquet seem, on the following day, like some enchanted dream. On one side sat Goldwin, the genius who had created this lovely witchery, urbane, devoted, allegiant; on the other side sat a man of deserved eminence, a wit, a scholar, a statesman. She talked with both companions, and it could not be said that she then charmed both, for one was already her loyal devotee. As for the other, though advanced in years and freighted with pungent experiences, he soon tacitly admitted that he had at last found, at the most discriminating period of his career, a woman whose graces of intelligence and beauty met in faultless unison. As all the ladies rose, leaving the gentlemen to their coffee and cigars, he leaned toward Goldwin, even before Claire's draperies had swept the threshold of the dining-room, and significantly murmured:—