V. V.'s Eyes

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

Carlisle would have preferred the tea-cakes, but she loved Hugo's lordly airs.

He dropped his gloves into a chair, and there descended upon him a winning embarrassment.

"Tell me now, for my sins and my penitence," he said in a low voice, his strong fingers clasping a spoon, "that you have blotted away what is past."

She said that she had blotted it all away.

He went on, with considerable loss of ease: "I suppose the accursed dilettante habit has got into my blood. I needed these unhappy days and nights, for my soul's good--"

"Oh, please!" said Carlisle, her eyes falling from his grave face. "Let's not talk of it any more."

He stopped, as if glad to leave the subject; but after a silence he added with entire continuity:

"Your spirit's very fine.... It's what I've always admired most in women, and found least often."

The loving waiter set tea and muffins. Peace unfolded white wings over the little table. A divine orchestra played a dreamy waltz that had reference to a beautiful lady. Carlisle poured, and remembered from Willie's apartment that Canning liked one lump and neither cream nor lemon. He seemed absurdly pleased by the small fact. The topic of the Past having been finally disposed of, the man's ordinary manner seemed abruptly to leave him. His gaze became oddly unsettled, but he perpetually returned it to Carlisle's face. He appeared enormously interested in everything that she said and did, yet at the same time erratically distrait and engrossed. He became more and more grave, but simultaneously he gave evidences of a considerable nervous excitement within....

If Carlisle noticed these eccentricities at all, she could have had no difficulty in diagnosing them, having observed them in the demeanor of young men before now. The case was otherwise with Canning, to whom his own unsteadinesses were a continuing amazement. Heart-whole he had reached his thirtieth year, and his present enterprise had furnished him with the surprise of his life. He was, indeed, a man who had lately looked upon a miracle. He had watched three humiliating rebuffs turn under his eye, as it were, to so many powerful lodestones. He himself hardly understood it, but it was a truth that no degree of cunning on the part of this girl could have so captured his imagination as her spirited independence of him (in mamma's vocabulary, her flare-up). A man who held himself naturally high, he had been irresistibly magnetized by her repulses of him. Rebuffed, he had sworn to go near her no more, and had turned again, an astonishment to himself, and tamely rung her bell....