"I ventured to come in," he said, apologetically, "although I knew Mr. Usselex was not at home. I wanted——"
"One might have thought your evenings were otherwise occupied," Eden interrupted, a little fiercely. The intercepted note of the preceding evening rankled still. That the young man should receive a letter from a strange woman was, she admitted to herself, a matter which did not concern her in the slightest. But it was impertinent on his part to suffer that letter to be sent to him at her house.
"This evening, however, as you see——" he began blandly enough, but Eden interrupted him again.
"What did you think of it last night?" she asked, with the inappositeness that was peculiar to her.
"You are clairvoyant enough, Mrs. Usselex, to know untold what I thought. It was of that I wished to speak to you. It is rare that such an opportunity is given me."
"To hear Wagner?"
"No, not to hear Wagner particularly." He hesitated and looked down at his pointed shoes, and at the moment Eden for the life of her could not help thinking of a dissolute young god arrayed in modern guise. After all, she reflected, it is probably the woman's fault.
"No, not that," he continued, and looked up at her again, his polar-eyes ablaze with unexpected auroras. "Not that; but think what it is for a man to love a woman, to divine that that love is returned, and yet to feel himself as far from her as death is from life. Think what it must be for him to love that woman so well that he would not haggle over ten years, no, nor ten hundred years of years, could he pass an hour with her, and then by way of contrast to find himself suddenly side by side with her, listening to such music as we heard last night."
"Mr. Arnswald, you are out of your senses," Eden exclaimed. A suspicion had entered her mind and declined to be dismissed.
"Am I not?" he answered. "Tell me that I am. I need to be told it. Yet last night, for the first time, it seemed to me that perhaps all might still be well. It was hope that I found with you, Mrs. Usselex; it was more than hope, it was life."