“Certainly, certainly, I agree—to keep you from flirting with other men.”
“Now fetch that portfolio over there,—it has Bruges in it,—and tell me something about every stone.”
They talked for two hours, and of much beside Bruges. Haphazardly as she had been educated in this new land, her natural intelligence had found nutrition in her father’s mind and library. Thorpe noted that when talking on subjects which appealed to the intellect alone, her face changed strikingly: the heavy lids lifted, the eyes sparkled coldly, the mouth lost its full curves. Even her voice, so warm and soft, became, more than once, harsh and sharp.
“There are several women in her,” he thought. “She certainly is very interesting. I should like to meet her again ten years hence.”
He did.
“Why don’t you travel?” he asked. “It would mean so much more to you than to most women. Even if Mr. Randolph cannot leave this fair young city he is building up, and your mother won’t leave him, you could go with some one else—”
“I never expect to leave California,” she said shortly. Then, as she met his look of surprise, she added: “I told you a fib when I said that I did not dream, or only a little. I get out of my own life for hours at a time by imagining myself in Europe, cultivating my mind, my taste for art, to their utmost limit, living a sort of impersonal life—Of course there are times when I imagine myself with some one who would care for it all as much as I, and know more—and all that. But I try to keep to the other. I have suffered enough to know that in the impersonal life is the surest content. And as for the other—it could not be, even if I ever met such a man. But dreams help one enormously, and I am the richer for all I have indulged in.”
Thorpe stood up again. Under a rather impassive exterior, he was a restless man, and his acquaintance with Nina Randolph had tried his nerves.
“I wish you had not given me half confidences, or that you would refrain from rousing my curiosity—my interest, as you do. It is hardly fair. I don’t wish to know what the family skeleton is, but I do want to know you better. If you want the truth, I have never been so intrigué by a woman in my life. And I have never so wanted to help one. I have been so drawn to you that I have had a sense of having done you a personal wrong ever since the other night. A man does not usually feel that way when he kisses a girl. I see it is no use to ask your confidence now; but, mind, I don’t say I sha’n’t demand it later on.”