“Do you mind my telling you intimate things like this?” she asked naively. “I had meant to tell them and had everything—all the information you could need—organized, you see. Even now, when you say that Petra doesn’t need psychoanalyzing, I still rather want to tell you. Before you are sure you are right about the wisdom of Petra’s leaving her father and me, giving up her life here with all its advantages, you ought to know a little more about the child herself, don’t you think? I see now—you have let me see—that my Petra herself, as a person, interests you, quite aside from your psychiatry. And I am grasping at that interest as at a straw, Doctor. I am so alone in my concern for this child and in my dreams for her! I’m not mistaken? You are interested, aren’t you?” This time at last the lady required an answer—waited for it.
“Yes, I am very much interested,” Lewis admitted, after a mere instant’s hesitation. But all the same he looked toward the door. If only Petra herself would appear there! Come in, in her frosty gown! Interrupt this really silly performance. He did not need any one to explain Petra to him. It was her presence he wanted. One meeting of their eyes had told him more than all the volumes Mrs. Lowell Farwell could say with that overtone in her voice which insisted on bending his understanding to her own interpretations of Petra—or more subtly yet, what she meant him to think were her interpretations. Really he could not doubt that Clare must know, as simply as he knew, that Petra did not need either of them; the integration of her young self was a perfected accomplishment and all the more perfected for having the seal of her reticence upon it.
Suddenly now Lewis knew why the blue gentians, there in the Cambridge apartment where first he saw Petra, had stayed so sharply etched on his memory. Petra herself was like a blue gentian,—a secret, brave flower springing from an arid soil. Lewis remembered “The Wind Boy,” a story he had bought lately for his nephews and read through before giving them. The little girl in that story was named Gentian, and her brother explained it: “Father always said that one small gentian had all the sky folded around in its soft fringes. Gentian magic. Cold and frost don’t scare it, for it has the whole sky held close to give it company and heart....” Well, that was true of Petra, just as it was true of the little girl in the fairy tale. But what made it true, how Petra had appropriated the blue sky and held its secrets as her own, where she had lain hold of it,—that Lewis could not guess.
Clare at this moment was vastly encouraged by the light which played—palpably—over the doctor’s lips and almost rose in his cold sleepy eyes This was approaching the way she had imagined things would go between them when they really got to talking intimately, and he began to see her in the way she intended he should see her. Before she was through with telling him about Petra to-night—the excuse for the tête-à-tête—this light of appreciation and admiration for herself would have become established unequivocally in the cold sleepy eyes. She had not a moment’s doubt of it. Nothing in past experience had instilled trepidation or the imagination of the possibility of failure into this sex-unconscious flirt whose line (she acknowledged it to herself and was quite simply proud of it) was spiritual rapport with interesting male personalities in the higher areas of contact. If passion developed in the course of these spiritual contacts, it was merely a sign, on a slightly lower plane, that all had gone well in the upper airs. It was a sign, in fact, that Clare’s vanity, though not her senses, ultimately demanded.
Her eyes fell from Lewis’ cold eyes to his mouth. She thought cleverly (she was far from stupid): “It’s a face of frozen passion. Not cold. It is all there. But frozen by asceticism.”
She was suddenly, hardly understanding why herself, extraordinarily excited.
Chapter Eight
Lewis continued to see a blue gentian etched on air, all the while Clare told him about Petra. But he heard her, well enough, in spite of the vision he was contemplating, and outwardly he was attentive.
“Lowell was frightfully young when he married Petra’s mother. And the attraction between them—it’s almost inevitable in early marriages like that, I suppose—was merely physical. So, when he waked up to that, it wasn’t nearly enough, not for a person like Lowell Farwell, anyway. But the only reason one need even remember that early tragedy is the way it still affects Petra. Her father got the idea, almost from the day she was born, that she was her mother over again. She was physically like her, in the first place. They say that Ann was a great beauty. Lowell says she was even more beautiful than Petra. But it wasn’t the physical resemblance that repelled Lowell most and still hurts. It was her mind and temperament. He got the idea that Petra had a commonplace mind, ordinary. Like her mother. And now, nineteen years after, she is still for him an echo—a reverberation—of an old disappointment. It seems cruel, I know. But he can’t help himself, and one can understand, don’t you think?