What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love than one—he had intimated that. She gathered that “Homer's children,” those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of art, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties; she was almost home.
“I am going away to-morrow,” he told her, “for the winter, to South America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change address send me a line to the Harvard Club.” The carriage had stopped before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its entire block. He got out and lifted her to the pavement as if she had been no more than a flower in his hands. Then he walked with her into the darkness of the garden.
The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and grass, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright. Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the cold. There was a faint sound in the air—the elevated trains, or stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her—was it toward heaven?—and kissed her mouth.
She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. “Linda Condon?” he said, in a tone of inquiry.
At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then, and this was strange, she realized that—as a kiss—it hadn't annoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding lip.
She saw him that way in her dreams—in the court under the massive somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.
XVII
Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.