Toward him, directly, when they met she would sometimes be glacial and forbidding, sometimes uninterestedly frank, as if they were but the best of commonplace friends. Yet sometimes she made him feel that she, too, threw herself heartily to rest in the thought of their loving, and cheated herself, as he did, with dreams of comradeship. She left him at these times with the feeling that they were deaf, dumb, and blind to each other; that if some means of communication could be devised, something surer than the invisible play of secret longings, all might yet be well. They talked as the people about them talked, words that meant nothing to either, and if there were mute questionings, naked appeals, unuttered declarations, they were only such as language serves to divert attention from. Speech, doubtless, has its uses as well as its abuses. Politics, for example, would be less entertaining without it. But in matters of the heart, certain it is that there would be fewer misunderstandings if it were forbidden between the couple under the penalty of immediate separation. In this affair real meanings are rarely conveyed except by silences. Words are not more than tasteless drapery to obscure their lines. The silence of lovers is the plainest of all speech, warning, disconcerting indeed, by its very bluntness, any but the truly mated. An hour's silence with these two people by themselves might have worked wonders.
Another diversion of Percival's during this somewhat feverish winter was Mrs. Akemit. Not only was she a woman of finished and expert daintiness in dress and manner and surroundings, but she soothed, flattered, and stimulated him. With the wisdom of her thirty-two years, devoted chiefly to a study of his species, she took care never to be exigent. She had the way of referring to herself as "poor little me," yet she never made demands or allowed him to feel that she expected anything from him in the way of allegiance.
Mrs. Akemit was not only like St. Paul, "all things to all men," but she had gone a step beyond that excellent theologue. She could be all things to one man. She was light-heartedly frivolous, soberly reflective, shallow, profound, cynical or naive, ingenuous, or inscrutable. She prized dearly the ecclesiastical background provided by her uncle, the bishop, and had him to dine with the same unerring sense of artistry that led her to select swiftly the becoming shade of sofa-cushion to put her blond head back upon.
The good bishop believed she had jeopardised her soul with divorce. He feared now she meant to lose it irrevocably through remarriage. As a foil to his austerity, therefore, she would be audaciously gay in his presence.
"Hell," she said to him one evening, "is given up so reluctantly by those who don't expect to go there." And while the bishop frowned into his salad she invited Percival to drink with her in the manner of a woman who is mad to invite perdition. If the good man could have beheld her before a background of frivolity he might have suffered less anxiety. For there her sense of contrast-values led her to be grave and deep, to express distaste for society with its hollowness, and to expose timidly the cruel scars on a soul meant for higher things.
Many afternoons Percival drank tea with her in the little red drawing-room of her dainty apartment up the avenue. Here in the half light which she had preferred since thirty, in a soft corner with which she harmonised faultlessly, and where the blaze from the open fire coloured her animated face just enough, she talked him usually into the glow of a high conceit with himself. When she dwelt upon the shortcomings of man, she did it with the air of frankly presuming him to be different from all others, one who could sympathise with her through knowing the frailties of his sex, yet one immeasurably superior to them. When he was led to talk of himself—of whom, it seemed, she could never learn enough—he at once came to take high views of himself: to gaze, through her tactful prompting, with a gentle, purring appreciation upon the manifest spectacle of his own worth.
Sometimes, away from her, he wondered how she did it. Sometimes, in her very presence, his sense of humour became alert and suspicious. Part of the time he decided her to be a charming woman, with a depth and quality of sweetness unguessed by the world. The rest of the time he remembered a saying about alfalfa made by Uncle Peter: "It's an innocent lookin', triflin' vegetable, but its roots go right down into the ground a hundred feet."
"My dear," Mrs. Akemit had once confided to an intimate in an hour of negligee, "to meet a man, any man, from a red-cheeked butcher boy to a bloodless monk, and not make him feel something new for you—something he never before felt for any other woman—really it's as criminal as a wrinkled stocking, or for blondes to wear shiny things. Every woman can do it, if she'll study a little how to reduce them to their least common denominator—how to make them primitive."
Of another member of Mrs. Akemit's household Percival acknowledged the sway with never a misgiving. He had been the devoted lover of Baby Akemit from the afternoon when he had first cajoled her into autobiography—a vivid, fire-tipped little thing with her mother's piquancy. He gleaned that day that she was "a quarter to four years old;" that she was mamma's girl, but papa was a friend of Santa Claus; that she went to "ball-dances" every day clad in "dest a stirt 'cause big ladies don't ever wear waist-es at night;" that she had once ridden in a merry-go-round and it made her "all homesick right here," patting her stomach; and that "elephants are horrid, but you mustn't be cruel to them and cut their eyes out. Oh, no!"
Her Percival courted with results that left nothing to be desired. She fell to the floor in helpless, shrieking laughter when he came. In his honour she composed and sang songs to an improvised and spirited accompaniment upon her toy piano. His favourites among these were "'Cause Why I Love You" and "Darling, Ask Myself to Come to You." She rendered them with much feeling. If he were present when her bed-time came she refused to sleep until he had consented to an interview.