Gladys was preoccupied and gloomy that morning. She was growing a little, just a little, tired of the American’s conversation. Even the excitement of arranging about the purchase in Yeoborough of suitable materials for her Ariadne costume did not serve to lift the shadow from her brow.
She was getting tired of her rôle as the naive, impetuous and childish innocent; and though mentally still quite resolved upon following her mother’s frequent and unblushing hints, and doing her best to “catch” this æsthetic master of a million dollars, the burden of the task was proving considerably irksome.
Ralph’s growing tendency to take her into his confidence in the matter of the philosophy of his art, she found peculiarly annoying.
Philosophy of any kind was detestable to Gladys, and this particular sort of philosophy especially depressed her, by reducing the attraction of physical beauty to a kind of dispassionate analysis, against the chilling virtue of which all her amorous wiles hopelessly collapsed. It was becoming increasingly difficult, too, to secure her furtive interviews with Luke—interviews in which her cynical sensuality, suppressed in the society of the American, was allowed full swing.
Her thoughts, at this very moment, turned passionately and vehemently towards the young stone-carver, who had achieved, at last, the enviable triumph of seriously ruffling and disturbing her egoistic self-reliance.
Unused to suffering the least thwarting in what she desired, it fretted and chafed her intolerably to be forced to go on playing her coquettish part with this good-natured but inaccessible admirer, while all the time her soul yearned so desperately for the shameless kisses that made her forget everything in the world but the ecstacy of passion.
It was all very well to plan this posing as Ariadne and to listen to Dangelis discoursing on the beauty of pagan myths. The artist might talk endlessly about dryads and fauns. The faun she longed to be pursued by, this wind-swept morning, was now engaged in hammering Leonian stone, in her father’s dusty work-shops.
She knew, she told herself, far better than the cleverest citizen of Ohio, what a real Greek god was like, both in his kindness and his unkindness; and her nerves quivered with irritation, as the hot southern wind blew upon her, to think that she would only be able, and even then for a miserably few minutes, to steal off to her true Dionysus, after submitting for a whole long day to this æsthetic foolery.
“It must have been a wind like this,” remarked Dangelis, quite unobservant of his companion’s moroseness, “which rocked the doomed palace of the blaspheming Pentheus and drove him forth to his fate.” He paused a moment, pondering, and then added, “I shall paint a picture of this, Gladys. I shall bring in Tiresias and the other old men, feeling the madness coming upon them.”
“I know all about that,” the girl felt compelled to answer. “They danced, didn’t they? They couldn’t help dancing, though they were so old and weak?”