At the sight of this mark upon her cheek, something troubled him. His mind, always alert to suggestive influences, registered the faintest impression of a thought at first too elusive to be called an idea. It was like the ultimate, dying ripple from some far-off shock to his consciousness. The impact died almost as it reached him—a flash, vaguely stimulating to his imagination, and then it was gone, its mysterious message uncomprehended.
She watched him a little impatiently, seeming to resent his scrutiny. Noticing this, he summoned his distracted attention and seated himself at the table. But, from time to time, now, his glance darted to her cheek surreptitiously, searching for the lost clue. He had learned the value of such subtle intuitions and would not give up his efforts to take advantage of this one.
She laid her bare hand upon the black velvet cushion beneath the light, saying, "I'm sorry that something has disturbed you." She looked at him, and then away.
"Why, nothing has disturbed me," he said. "Why should you think so?" Even as he pulled himself together for this denial her quick perception gave him another cause for wonder.
"I'm rather sensitive to other people's moods sometimes. That's one reason why I came. I didn't know but you might tell me something about it—how far to trust it, perhaps—though I came, I confess, more from curiosity."
Her air was still so detached that her conversational approaches seemed almost experimental. She spoke with pauses between her phrases, while her eyes, now showing full and clear gray, lit upon him only to rove off, returned and departed again, but never rapidly, as if she sought for her words here and there in the room, and brought them calmly back to him. She did not shun a direct gaze, but her look wandered as her thought wandered in its logical course, for the time seeming to forget his presence.
He took her hand and felt of it, testing its quality and texture, preparing himself for his speech. Her hand was long and slim, with scarcely a fiber more flesh upon the bones than was necessary to cover them admirably. He had no thought at first except to give his ordinary routine of reading, but his study of her showed her to be an exceptional character. She was beautiful, with the loveliness of an aristocratic and slightly bewildering spiritual type. Her hand in his was magnetic, delicious of contact, subtly alive even though not consciously responsive. Other women with more obvious charm had left him cold. She, aided by no suggestion of coquetry or complaisance, allured him. She awakened in him a desire not wholly physical, although he could not fail to regard her primarily in the sex relation that, so far, had been his chief interest in women. She, as a woman, answered, in some secret way, him, as a man. This was his first wave of feeling. Her hint amused him, true as her intuition had been; she had stumbled upon his embarrassment, no doubt, and had claimed prescience, a common enough form of feminine conceit. There he had a valuable suggestion as to the direction of her line of least resistance to his wiles.
Following upon this, as the first feeling of her unreality faded, upon contact, came the thought of her as a wealthy and credulous girl, who might minister to his ambitions. He was without real social aspirations, except in so far as his success in the fashionable world favored the game he was playing. Years of contact with credulity and hypocrisy had carried him, mentally, too far to value the lionizing and the hero-worship he had tasted from his smarter clients. But the patronage of such a fair and finished creature as this girl, especially if he could establish a more intimate relation, might secure the permanence of his position and his opportunities. He saw vistas of delight and satisfaction in such an acquaintance. He had had his fill of silly women whose favors were paid for in ministrations to their vanity. Such tribute, easy as it was for him with his facility, irked him. Here, perhaps, was one who might hold his interest by her fineness and her mentality, and by the very difficulty he might find in impressing her. There would be zest to the pursuit.
Beneath these waves of feeling, however, and beneath his active intelligence, there was an inchoate disturbance in some subconscious stratum of his mind. He felt it only as the slight mental perplexity the mole upon her cheek had caused; he had no time, now, to pursue that incipient idea. His impression of her as a desirable, pleasurable quarry incited him to devise the psychological method necessary for her capture. He knew to a hair, usually, what he could do with women; but now he was forced to gain time by a preamble in the conventional patter of the palmist's cult.
Her hand, it appeared, was of a mixed type, neither square nor conic, with long fingers, inclined to be psychic. He remarked the extraordinary sensitiveness denoted by their cushioned tips. Nails, healthy and oval; knuckles indicating a good sense of order in mental and physical life. She was, in short, of strong, vigorous mentality, well-balanced, artistic, generous, liberal; but (he referred to the Mount of Jupiter) with a tendency to be a looker-on rather than a sharer in the ordinary social pleasures of life. Saturn, developed more toward the finger, gave her a slightly melancholy temperament; Apollo showed a great appreciation of the beautiful in nature, with no little critical knowledge of art; Mercury was less developed, and implied a lack of humor; Venus betrayed a well-controlled but warm feeling; it was soft—she was, consequently, easily moved. Her thumb was wilful rather than logical, her fingers suggested respectively, pride, perception, self-respect, morbidity, love of the beautiful as distinguished from the ornamental, tact.