He stared at her, incredulous, believing he could not have heard.
"... an affair that has worried me," she repeated, noticing his blank look.
Stupefied as he was, he felt a great pity rush over him, an instant longing to be her knight and give battle for her—to be her squire, if she herself must be knight. Yet, if Teevan had spoken truly must it not be a thing in which he was powerless to help her ever so little? A sudden sickness of rage came over him at thought of Teevan. He had almost made a jest of her.
He could not talk of himself after that. She could get nothing from him of his own worries, though she could see that he had these in abundance. At last she tired of striving against him and let him go, out of sheer longing for the touch of his hand at parting. He had regarded her with a moody, almost savage tenderness that made her weak.
As he walked home he felt new to the streets again. They were strange streets in a strange world. But one thing he was sure of; one thing stood clearly out of the puzzle: he must not intrude, must not bother her; must not see her often. In a drama so alien to him he could not act without direction. He knew his own longing too well to trust himself. He sat a long time with his arms clasped across his breast. The anguish in it seemed physical; it was as if a beast were devouring his heart.
CHAPTER XXII
A REVOLT
HE turned furiously to his work, but, as the summer came on, he realized that he was working with a desperation entirely heartless. He was not only sure, now, that he had taken a wrong road, but that nameless distress of his lady had left his desire benumbed. A fountain had gone dry in him.
At the beginning of the warm days he went into the country on sketching trips with Sydenham. To vales and little rivers north of the city, to flat, green stretches on Long Island, to the Jersey hills, they had gone with sketch traps wherever trolley or steam car could find Nature quickly for them.
Ewing had looked forward to this. He had felt hampered in the studio, where he must pass whole days in futile messing with colors, in rash trials of this or that trick of tint, like an idling schoolboy playing with slate and pencil. Once in the open, he had felt, there would quickly show forth those gifts which Teevan was certain he possessed.