Laurence found in her voice a peculiar emotional timbre which never failed to stir him, and when she sat down near him he was caught as always by the helplessness of her large hands lying in her lap.
"I don't fancy his playing with motor cycles."
They were silent a moment.
"Julie?" He smiled apologetically. He noticed that her eyes evaded him and it made him unhappy. "Not much company for you. I'm a typical American man of business—engrossed in my profession. Wasn't it to-night that you were going to that meeting on Foreign Relief?"
"You've discouraged my philanthropies," Julia said. "Besides, they won't miss me." She lowered her gaze, and made a wry deprecating mouth.
He felt that she was shutting him out from something—from her cold youth. He had not intended to discourage her enthusiasms, but it would have relieved him to enfold her in the warmth of his inertia. He said inwardly that he must keep himself until she needed him. He wondered if he were merely jealous of her youngness which went on beyond him discovering itself.
There was a pastel on the desk beside him. "I see Allen has done another portrait of you."
Julia flushed as she turned to him. In her open look he found something concealed. He was ashamed of his thought. He stared at his own hands and hated their sensitiveness.
"I can't pretend to see myself in it. It looks grotesque to us with our Victorian conceptions of art, doesn't it?" She smiled, gazing at him with a harassed but eager air of demand.
He did not wish to see her eyes that asked to be defended against themselves. He stared at the picture a moment in silence. It irritated him to feel that the artist had observed something in Julia which was hidden from her husband. When he finally glanced with hard amused eyes at her, he felt himself weak. "My mentality is not equal to an appreciation of your friend's stuff. I'm hopelessly bourgeois, Julia." He would not admit his hardening against each of Julia's interests as they came to her. He put his pain with the transience of her youth and condescended to her so that he need not take note of himself. "Did you arrange for the lecture courses at the settlement house?" he asked. He missed her former feverish engrossment in the projected lecture series and wanted to bring her back to it.