“Deb ... my dear....”
He had from the beginning philosophically summed her up as incapable of extremes. But it was not as though he were dependent.... He did not love Deb; he was a little bit in love with her; and she was elfish, delicate, captivating, freshly surprising at each encounter, like in June the first strawberry whose unremembered flavour one has taken for granted through the winter months. Yes, she was charming. And he was wrong in his estimate of her. After all, she had come to him——
One tiny gesture of his—and Deb’s histrionics lay shattered like a wave into foam....
“No ... no ... no—not now.... Oh, please!”
A moment later, and Blair said, from the other end of the room: “There was no need for that ‘please,’ dear. The first ‘no’ would have been enough.”
She lay angrily sobbing, hair not even disordered, her drapings of pale ninon shamefully untumbled. The desperate encounter had yielded her one scrap of self-knowledge—nothing else: That she was not in the least passionate by nature, and that only love could raise her nature to passion; that she had been misled all her life by a mere illusion deduced by herself and others from her face and her way of moving, and her recklessness of speech and her Jewish pliability.... To her mother who was a Gentile, was due this slight chilliness, blown like a hoar-frost over what might otherwise have been an exotic blossoming.
And the man by the window murmured: “‘To play at half a love with half a lover,’ ... is that what you wanted, child, and couldn’t express? I didn’t understand. Well——”
He crossed again to the couch and stood looking down upon her, hands clasped behind his back, mouth bent to a whimsical smile—“Well—It’s not too late, is it?”