Her fine eyes agreed with that theory. They said as plainly as though the words were spoken: “How brilliant of you to associate Etruria with the mythical civilisation of Atlantis!”
On the other hand, her eyes did not say many things that she thought.
“What is so fine about friendship,” Gordon was going on, “is that we have lifted common interest above the sordid range of philanderism.”
“How’s that?”
Her head was bent forward eagerly, enquiringly. Trenter had the same trick, only he looked pained.
“I mean”—Gordon Selsbury flicked a crumb of cake daintily from his knee—“we have never tarnished the bright surface of our friendship with that weakness which is so glibly styled ‘love.’”
“Oh!” Heloise van Oynne sat back in her basket chair. “That’s so,” she said, and if there was a sense of immense satisfaction in her tone, even one attuned to her spiritual wavelength would not have observed the circumstance.
“The perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding, the dovetailing of mind into mind, the oneness of a mutual soul—these transcend all sentient impressions, whatever be the label they bear.”
She smiled slowly and with infinite sweetness and comradeship. Heloise invariably smiled at Gordon that way when she wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about. Though, as to souls——
“The soul is certainly the finest thing we have around,” she said, in deep thought. “That’s where we’ve got most people skinned—I should say, at a disadvantage, you and I, Gordon. One doesn’t like to bare one’s heart; one shrinks instinctively even from self-revelation.”