“This Benedictine is all I happen to have,” she said. “Swallow it down. It will do you good.”
Theron obeyed her. It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection, it was grateful and warming. He did feel better almost immediately. A great wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back on the divan. For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was dying. He drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.
Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her head against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced him.
“I dare say we forced the pace a little,” she remarked, after a pause, looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement playing in the corners of her mouth. “It doesn't do for a man to get to be a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually.”
He remembered the music. “Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,” he murmured ecstatically, “what a revelation your playing has been to me! I had never imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying day.”
He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the music ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in his mind. Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure to the broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had disappeared were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning within, out of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled with white marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which shaped themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.
“I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of yours,” he said with the abruptness of confusion.
Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. “Oh,” she said almost indifferently, “lots of things. Absolute freedom from moral bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only thing in life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life everything that isn't worth while; and so on.”
“But,” said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her face, “I am going to get you to teach it ALL to me.” The memories began crowding in upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka had stopped short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. “I want to be a Greek myself, if you're one. I want to get as close to you—to your ideal, that is, as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not even dreamed existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and now, after tonight—you and the music have decided me. I am going to put the things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help me; you must tell me how to begin.”
He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his face. He rose on the instant.