"Then what are you expecting?" she inquired a little coolly.
"Well," he deliberated, "not expecting you to get me ready for a sweet, and then pop in a pickle; and presently expecting, hoping, anxiously anticipating, what you really care to say."
He was expecting, she looked maliciously, more than he was likely to get; but the fact that he did see through her to that extent was at once delightful and alarming. She swayed back into the shadow beyond the dazzling line of light. She wanted to escape his scrutiny, to be able to look him over from a safe vantage-ground. But he wouldn't have it. An instant he stood under the torrent of white radiance, challenging her to see what she could—then followed her into her retreat. "Shall we sit here?" he said, and she found herself hopelessly cut off and isolated with the enemy.
She couldn't withhold a little grudging pleasure in the sharpness with which he had turned her maneuver, and the way it had detached them from the surrounding crowd. For there, in the dusky center of the room, it was as if they watched from safe covert the rest of their party exposed in the glare of light; though not, as Flora presently noted, quite escaping observation themselves. For an instant Harry turned and peered toward them with a look in his intentness that struck Flora as something new in him, and made her wonder if he could be jealous. She turned tentatively to see if Kerr had noticed it, and surprised his glance in a quick transition back to hers.
"By your leave," he said, and took away her fan, which in his hand presently assumed such rhythmic motion that it ceased to be any more present to her than a delicate current of air upon her face. Her face, which in the first place he had so well looked over, he now looked into with something more personal in his quest, as if under the low brows and crowding lashes there was a puzzle to solve in the timid, unassured glances of such splendid eyes.
He was not, she felt sure, in spite of his light manipulation of her fan, a person who cared to please women, but one of that devastating sort who care above everything to please themselves, and who are skilful without practice; too skilful, she feared, for her defenses to hold out against if he intended to find out what she really thought. "Aren't we supposed to be looking at the pictures?" she wanted to know.
He turned his back on the wall and its attendant glare. "Why pictures," he inquired, "when there are live people to look at? Pictures for places where they're all half dead. But here, where even the damnable dust in the street is alive, why should they paint, or write, or sculpt, or do anything but live?" His irascible brows shot the query at her.
Again the proposition of life—whatever that was—was held up before her, and as ever she faltered in the face of it. "I suppose they do it here," she murmured, with a vague glance at the paintings around her, "because people do it everywhere else."
His disparagement was almost a snarl. "That's the rotten part of it—because they do it everywhere else! As if there wasn't enough monotony in the world already without every chap trying to be like the next instead of being himself!"
"Ah!" Her small, uncertain smile in the midst of her outward splendor was pathetic. "But it is different to you. You're a man. You're not one of us."