The cheerful sound of his voice brought the tears suddenly to her eyes, and she remembered a man whom she had once seen in a hospital, smiling after a frightful accident through which he had passed.
"Are you yourself so tired?" she asked.
"I?" he shook his head. "Oh, I was using the glittering generalities again."
"And yet you seldom take even the smallest of vacations," she insisted.
"One doesn't need it when one is broken in as I am. There's a joy in getting one's work behind one that the luxury of idleness does not know."
"All the same I wish you'd stop awhile." Then she gave him one of her long, thoughtful looks and spoke with the beautiful, vibrant note in her voice which he had called its "Creole quality." "We have been such old, such close, such dear friends," she went on, "that I wonder if I may tell you how profoundly—how sincerely—"
She faltered and he took up her unfinished sentence with the instinct to put her embarrassment at ease. "I knew it all along, God bless you," he said. "One feels such things, I think."
"One ought to," she responded.
"It's been hard," he pursued frankly; and she was struck by the utter absence of picturesqueness, of the whining tone of the victim in his treatment of the situation. There was no appeal to her sympathy in his manner, and he impressed her suddenly as a man who had come into possession of a power over the results of events if not over the passage of events themselves. "It's been harder, perhaps, than I can say—poor girl," he added quickly.
With a start she sat erect in her chair. "And you can stop to think of her?" she demanded.