“What?” he asked, through the thin azure smoke of the cigar. She shook her head contentedly:
“I don't care; I have—now, anyway—what I wish, what I've always wished for—you. I didn't know it was you right away, how could I? Not even when we had tea, and talked about Mina and your young Morris, that first afternoon. It was the next day before I understood. Why wasn't it long long ago, when I was a girl, twelve years old? Yes, quite that early. Isn't it queer, Lee, how I have been troubled by love? It bothers hardly anyone else, it scarcely touches the rest. There is a lot of talk about it, but, all the while, people detest it. They are always wearing dresses and pretentions they can't afford to have mussed. It—I am still talking of love, Lee darling—breaks up their silly society and morals ... like a strong light thrown on something shabby.”
Once more he had the feeling that, before the actuality of Savina's tragic necessity, his own speculations were merely visionary, immaterial; yet he tried to put them into words, to explain, so far as he was able, what it was in him that was hers. But he did this omitting, perhaps, the foundation of all that he was trying to say—he didn't speak of Cytherea. He avoided putting the doll into words because he could think of none that would make his meaning, his attachment, clear. Lee couldn't, very well, across the remnants of dinner, admit to Savina that a doll bought out of a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue so deeply influenced him. He hadn't lost Cytherea in Savina so much as, vitalized, he had found her. And, while he had surrendered completely to the woman and emotion, at the same time the immaterial aspect of his search, if he could so concretely define it, persisted. The difference between Savina and himself was this: while she was immersed, obliterated, satisfied, in her passion, a part of him, however small, stayed aside. It didn't control him, but simply went along, like a diminutive and wondering child he had by the hand.
Cytherea, at this moment, would be softly illuminated by the shifting glow of the fire and, remote in her magical perspective, would seem at the point of moving, of beckoning for him with her lifted hand.
“What were you seeing in the smoke?” Savina asked; and he replied with an adequate truth, “You.”
“Why not just look at me, then, instead of staring?”
“I see you everywhere.”
“Adorable,” she whispered.
No such name, no terms of endearment, occurred to him for her; why, he didn't know; but they had no place in his present situation. He had to think of Savina as removed from whatever had described and touched other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to have a smoothly false, a brassy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily, committed, he had a necessity to make his relationship with Savina Grove wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if he were rich.
“Your husband wouldn't think so,” he replied; “yet I am doing well enough; I can afford dinner and the theatre.”