"Ouidà's Apollo," she thought, but in the very mockery she trembled, struck as by a lightning shaft. The blackness was sucked up into fire and light. "Am I in the way?" she said with her most bewitching smile.
He raised his hat. "I was afraid you might have been struck."
"Perhaps I was," she could not help saying.
"Oh, gracious, are you hurt?" His voice was instantly caressing.
"Do I look an object for ambulances?"
He smiled dazzlingly. "You look awfully jolly." Later Eileen remembered how she had taken this reply for a line of poetry.
A week later the Hon. Reginald Winsor, younger brother of an English Earl, was teaching Eileen golf.
It had been a week of ecstasy.
She thought of Reginald the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning and dreamed of him all night.
Now she knew what her life had lacked—to be caught up into another's personality, to lose one's petty individuality in—in what? Surely not in a larger; she couldn't be so blind as that. In what then? Ah, yes, in Nature. He was gloriously elemental. He wasn't himself. He was the masculine. Yes, that was the correlative element her being needed. The mere manliness of his pipe made its aroma in his clothes adorable. Or was it his big simplicity, in which she could bury all her torturing complexity? Oh, to nestle in it and be at rest. Yet she held him at arm's length. When they shook hands her nerves thrilled, but she was the colder outwardly for very fear of herself.