She threw her head back with an answering smile. “Why should I, when I feel years younger?”
Thank heaven, an approaching group of people must have obstructed her daughter’s view! Mrs. Clephane hurried on, wanting to put as much distance as she could between herself and Chris’s retreating figure before she came up with her daughter. When she did, she plunged straight into the girl’s eyes, and saw that they were still turned on her inward vision. “Dearest,” she cried gaily, “I can see by your look that you’ve been doing a good day’s work.”
Anne’s soul rose slowly to the surface, shining out between deep lashes. “How do you know, I wonder? I suppose you must have been a great deal with somebody who painted. For a long time afterward one carries the thing about with one wherever one goes.” She slipped her arm in Kate’s, and turned unresistingly as the latter guided her back toward Fifth Avenue.
“It’s dusty in the Park, and I feel as if I wanted a quick walk home. I like Fifth Avenue when the lights are just coming out,” Mrs. Clephane explained.
All night long she lay awake in the great bed of the Clephane spare-room, and stared at Chris. While they still faced each other—and after her first confused impression of his having thickened and reddened—she had seen him only through the blur of her fears and tremors. Even after they had parted, and she was walking home with Anne, the shock of the encounter still tingling in her, he remained far off, almost imponderable, less close and importunate than her memories of him. It was as if his actual presence had exorcised his ghost. But now—
He had not vanished; he had only been waiting. Waiting till she was alone in her room in the sleeping house, in the unheeding city. How alone, she had never more acutely felt. Who on earth was there to intervene between them, when there was not a soul to whom she could even breathe that she had met him? She lay in the darkness with terrified staring eyes, and there he stood, his smile deriding her—a strange composite figure, made equally of the old Chris and the new....
It was of no use to shut her eyes; he was between lid and ball. It was of no use to murmur disjointed phrases to herself, conjure him away with the language of her new life, with allusions and incantations unknown to him; he just stood there and waited. Well, then—she would face it out now, would deal with him! But how? What was he to her, and what did he want of her?
Yes: it all came to the question of what he wanted; it always had. When had there ever been a question of what she wanted? He took what he chose from life, gathered and let drop and went on: it was the artist’s way, he told her. But what could he possibly want of her now, and why did she imagine that he wanted anything, when by his own showing he was so busy and so provided for?
She pulled herself together, suddenly ashamed of her own thoughts. In pity for herself she would have liked to draw the old tattered glamour over him; but there must always have been rents and cracks in it, and now it couldn’t by any tugging be made to cover him. No; she didn’t love him any longer; she was sure of that. Like a traveller who has just skirted an abyss, she could lean over without dizziness and measure the depth into which she had not fallen. But if that were so, why was she so afraid of him? If it were a mere question of her own social safety, a mean dread of having her past suspected, why, she was more ashamed of that than of having loved him. She would almost rather have endured the misery of still loving him than of seeing what he and she looked like, now that the tide had ebbed from them. She had been a coward; she had been stiff and frightened and conventional, when, from the vantage-ground of her new security, she could so easily have been friendly and generous; she felt like rushing out into the streets to find him, to speak to him as she ought to have spoken, to tell him that she was not in the least afraid of him.