"Doubly privileged mortal, then, to find yourself welcome."
"Do I abuse my privileges, Althea?"
"Never in the world. You are as unobtrusive, my dear friend, as a gray sky."
Paul, as he sat down by the fire, wondered why the phrase rang reminiscently. Who had compared his eyes once before to rain-clouds? Oh! he remembered. It was the little girl, in the summer-time, by the sea. He seldom thought of her now; when he did, it was without such a personal pang of loss as might have been expected. She had come—she had gone. The life before he had known her, the life after, like parted leaden waters in the wake of a ship, closed above her memory.
For form's sake, and in order that his presence might not fret his hostess, he picked up a book at random and opened it on his knee; but his eyes, after a few minutes' aimless reading, left the printed page and rested on her. She was writing quickly. The fountain-pen poised, pounced, ran forward, and was checked anew. A little pucker on her forehead straightened out as each sentence was completed. The shaded electric lamp before her left the brows in a green shadow, but flooded neck and arms with naked light. She was dressed in black; a long limp scarf the color of a dead rose-leaf lay across her shoulders, trailed upon the carpet, moved with the motion of the restless bare arm. Her beautiful chestnut hair was drawn up from her neck and dressed high on her head in soft rolls and plaits. Looking at her, and remembering the furnace through which she had passed, Ingram marvelled once again that the searing flame should have left so little evident trace upon her.
He had come prepared for explanation, reproaches, rupture even, but never in his life had he felt less ardor for battle, more doubt as to whether the cause were worthy the warfare. Hope deferred, neglect, dejection, had nearly done their work. He was beginning to doubt his own powers, inclining more each day to take the world's estimate of them as final. He had been writing a good deal lately, and to little purpose; it seemed unlikely that, years before, he had done better. No man endowed with the artist's temperament ever gained ease to himself by deliberately writing down to some imagined popular level. It is doubtful even whether the thing is to be done at all; probably every one that succeeds, even in the coarse acceptation of the term, succeeds by doing the best that is in him. The world may have no eye for genius, but it is quick to detect disrespect.
It was early in March: he had known her now nearly six months. To say that they had become better friends in that time would be inexact; it is juster to say that, from the high level of her first acclaim, he had never known her to descend. She had seemed to divine that he was already sick of beginnings that led nowhere, and lacked patience for the circumspect steps that friendship in the first degree requires. From the outset she showed him a full measure. She had a multitude of friends—much devotion, even, at her command. Here and there, amid the exotic sentimentality that for some reason or other was the dominant note in her circle, a graver, truer note vibrated; and yet, before he had known her a month, Paul must have been obtuse indeed not to have noticed a special appeal in her voice and a special significance in the hand-clasp that was kept for him. And if he was not precisely grateful, he was, at any rate, tremendously impressed. He had learnt her history, and no adventitious aid that riches, popularity, fine clothing or jewels—and none of these was wanting—could have lent her would so overwhelmingly have presented her to his imagination as this. That she should have emerged from such an ordeal at all was wonderful, but that she should have come through it beautiful still, gentle and plaintively wise, lent an almost spectral charm to her beauty, and the same significance to her lightest comment on men or things that one strives to read into a rapped-out message wrung from the dubious silence of the grave. The strange unreality which none who knew Althea well escaped noticing, though all did not call it by the same name, reached him, oppressed as he was by the burden of the material world, almost like a native air. In her house he breathed freely, forgot his chagrins, was enveloped in a formless sympathy that, by anticipating the unwelcome thought, spared him even the humiliation of uttering it.
Perhaps, without looking at him, she had guessed his thought now. At least there was a little conscious gaiety in her voice as she laid by her pen and packed the loose sheets square.
"Voilà!" said she. To speak French always carries the register a key higher. She switched off the light, and moved to the seat opposite him with a soft rustle of skirts. One finger-tip was marked with ink. She put it furtively to her lips and streaked it, schoolgirl fashion, down her black dress.
"Would you like to know who you are dining with?" she asked, taking a slip of paper from the mantelpiece. "We're very worldly indeed to-night. 'Marchesina d'Empoli, the Countess of Hatherley, Lady Claire Templeton, Mrs. Sidney Musgrave.' Here! see for yourself."