For a week after this she did not see him again; and then one Saturday afternoon, when she was leaving Dinard's, they met by chance and walked home together. It was the first time she had been in the street with him, and she was conscious of feeling absurdly young and girlish—she, the mother of a daughter old enough to have love affairs! A soft flush—the flush of youth—tinted her pale cheek; her step, which so often dragged wearily after the day's work, was as buoyant as Fanny's; and her low, beautiful laugh was as gay as if she were not burdened by innumerable anxieties. As they passed a shop window, her reflection flashed back at her, and she thought happily: "Yes, it is true, you are better looking at thirty-seven, Gabriella, than you were at twenty."
"Shall we walk down?" asked O'Hara, and added: "So that was your shop? I am glad that I saw it. But what do you do there all day?"
She laughed merrily. "Put in pins and take them out again. Design, direct, scold, and flatter. We are getting in the spring models now, and it's very exciting."
He glanced down at her figure, noting, as if for the first time, the narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the bunchiness around the hips.
"Did you make that?" he inquired.
"This coat? Oh, no; it came from Paris. It was left on my hands," she explained, "or I shouldn't be wearing it. I wear only what people won't buy, you know."
"No, I didn't know," he returned abstractedly, and she observed humorously after a minute that he was not thinking of her because he was thinking so profoundly about her clothes. It was his way, she had discovered, to concentrate his mind intensely upon the object before him, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might appear. He seemed never to have learned how to divide either his interest or his attention.
"If you could make what you wanted," he remarked, "I should think you'd make them more comfortable. Are you going to wear those hobble skirts this spring?"
"They'll be narrow at the feet but very bunchy at the top—doesn't that sound delightful? I am making a white taffeta for Fanny that has five or six yards of perfectly good material puffed out in the most ridiculous way at the back over a petticoat of silver lace."
Her spirits felt so light, so effervescent, that she wanted to jest, to laugh, to talk nonsense interminably; and after his first moments of bewilderment, when he appeared still unable to detach his mind from his business, he entered gaily and heartily into her mood. His perplexities once disposed of, he gave himself entirely to the enjoyment of the walk with her, and she noticed for the first time his boyish delight in the simplest details of life. With the simplicity of a man to whom large pleasures are unknown, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the momentary diversion of small ones. Every person in the crowd, she discovered, excited his interest, and his humour bubbled over at the most insignificant things—at the grimace of a newsboy who offered him a paper, at the absurd hat worn by a woman in a motor car, at the expression of disgusted solemnity on the face of a servant in livery, at the giggles of an over-dressed girl who hung on the arm of an anemic and exhausted admirer. Never before had she encountered such vitality, such careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life. There was a tonic quality in his physical presence, and while she walked at his side down Fifth Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward by one of the health-giving, pine-scented winds of Colorado. And she told herself reassuringly that only a man who had lived decently could have kept himself so extraordinarily young and exuberant at forty-five.