“I’m the luckiest man in the world. Listen, Dmitri; quit bowing and understand. This is—” Ames hesitated and laughed. “I don’t even know your last name, Carlota. You tell him. You met each other at Phelps’s.”
Carlota looked at the newcomer in her grave, measuring way. She had not remembered him at all. He was older than Ames, and without any claims whatever to good looks. Swarthy, thin, slight, stoop-shouldered, careless in dress, there was still something indefinably distinguished and reassuring about him. He might have sat for a bust of the youthful Socrates with his blunt, uneven profile. A perpetual smile perched on his wide mouth; not a propitiatory smile, but rather a tolerant one. Here was a spirit that might have waited æons on the edge of chaos, believing absolutely in the ultimate birth of cosmic harmony, even on earth.
“Please! I beg you not to.” He interrupted her. “I do not wish to know your name. Identity is the cloak of selfishness. They number convicts and name hapless infants. Human consciousness is a universal lottery where the lucky numbers win by drawing personality in lots of genius. Griffeth is a genius. I am one. You, too, with that face, do not have to be a genius. You are Woman, incarnate Love and Inspiration to us poor devils.”
“Give him work to keep him quiet,” advised Ames.
But Dmitri picked up his bundles and began opening them with the air of a high priest at his ritual.
“I shall prepare a feast for you to-day, a treat. The brigand stew of Bulgaria. I have eaten it on mountain heights where even the goats die of starvation.”
“I think I will go,” Carlota said in her quick, aloof way, and Dmitri turned to her eagerly, his face full of a strange, beseeching charm.
“See, I have disappointed you!” he declared; “when for weeks I have hoped to catch you here on one of your flights of passage. First when I saw you at Mr. Phelps’s, you overlooked me absolutely for him.” He nodded at Ames. “He is merely spectacular. He had no more vision, no wider horizons than a mole. When he told me yesterday that you would never come here again, I understood perfectly. I told him you would surely return, but I knew also why you were angry with him. He stands outside our range of perspective, so you must forgive him. He blunders like a baby lamb; you know the kind with large knees and prodigious ears, utterly hopeless.”
“Grand old Diogenes; all he needs is a tub and lantern to go into business.” Ames patted him affectionately. “Put your old lamb on to stew and stop spouting if we are to eat it to-day. What do you do first, braise it?”
“Let it alone. He is become the plaything of the privileged classes.” Dmitri seized his bundles and made for the kitchenette, where he declaimed just the same. “How many times in three days have you motored down to Long Island? Confess.”