"I think not. Not this evening. Go by yourself, and tell me all the great changes to-morrow. She will be much better pleased to see you than me, anyway."
"Why do you say that?"
"Her face, my dear boy! She can't play the piano, to speak of, and she greatly prefers men to women."
"Perhaps you do her an injustice—"
"Have I said anything disparaging? I signalled two virtues, I think. You don't really mind my not going, Damon? I had intended to write letters this evening, and mend table-cloths and read to father."
When, shortly after tea, Damon had gone, Chloris tried to return herself into a truthful person by reading an hour to her father, and adding a dozen stitches to a delicate darn, and writing a note, which, when finished, she tore up. In order, as far as possible, with her conscience, she seated herself at the piano, a poor, tin-voiced instrument, tired of the sea-air. No one so well as Chloris, accustomed to its senile vagaries, could make the worn thing discourse music; her greatest successes on it were old-time compositions written in the day of spinet and harpsichord, minuets with a sprinkling of grace-notes, things not sonorous or profound. To-night, playing for no one's praise, she plunged haphazard into the melodies most sympathetic at the moment, stormy and subtle, melancholy and intricate and modern. It was Chloris's one proud gift, this effectiveness at the piano.
Her father and his elderly sisters took themselves off to bed on the stroke of ten. Chloris remained on the adjustable stool, relieved at their going. She took up her playing again, without trying now to keep her eyes dry.
The sweet, hot air of the day, cooling, was turned to dew outside; something of the same kind seemed taking place within herself—and the dew was tears. Why had she been so curiously uplifted that day, so at rest concerning every point in life, so sure of one thing at least? Nothing was changed, yet she saw no reason now for blessing this summer, golden hour for hour, and looking to it for the greatest, serenest happiness. Damon? What was Damon to her, or she to Damon? He had never in so many words made love to her, and she had never felt the first pang of wonder or disappointment at this. They had walked, rowed, ridden together. What of it? They should do these things again a hundred times, probably. What of that? What had she been dreaming, erewhile? Or was this the dream, this bad one? Something splendid and shining and purple had gone gray.
While continuing mechanically to play, she looked through the open window into the summer night. It was rightfully her moon, that honeyed bright moon outside; her balm-breathing night; it was her silver sea yonder out of sight; they were her odorous pine-needle paths in the sighing grove—and she was robbed of them. And the sense of it gave her a seething in the heart, the like of which sensation she had never dreamed existed: as if a painful separation of all the atoms in it one from the other, as well as the stern conviction of being—oh, the novel idea!—a fool.