XXVIII
The only other quantity in her life was Dodge Pleydon. He wrote her again, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; but his letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that she had to ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added:
“That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed enormously—curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as myself. It's clear that he has dropped his women. I saw a photograph of the Cotton Mather reproduced in a weekly, and it was as gaunt as a Puritan Sunday. Brimmed with power. Why don't we see him oftener? Write and say I'd like to contradict him again about the Eastlake period.”
He made no further reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed to write as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at the possibility of a continuation of his admissions of love she was weary of the thought of its uselessness. Linda was, she told herself, damned by practicability. Her husband used the familiar term of reproach, material. She didn't in the least want to be. Circumstance, she had a feeling, had forced it upon her.
Arnaud, however, who had met Dodge Pleydon in Philadelphia, brought him home. Linda saw with a strange constriction of the heart that Pleydon's hair was definitely gray. He had had a recurrence of the fever contracted in Soochow. The men at once entered on another discussion which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that her husband now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to the sculptor. Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatient with minds that disagreed with his. He was at once thinner and bigger, his face deeply lined; but his eyes had a steady vital intensity difficult to encounter.
She considered him in detail as the talk left dinner, the glasses and candles spent. He drank, from a tall tumbler with a single piece of ice, the special whisky Arnaud kept. He had been neglecting himself, too—there were traces of clay about his finger-nails, and he ate hurriedly and insufficiently. When she had an opportunity, Linda decided, she would speak to him about these necessary trifles. Then, she had no chance; and it was not until the following winter, at a Thursday afternoon concert during the yearly exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, that she could gently complain.
It was gloomy, with a promise of snow outside; and the great space of the stairway to the galleries was filled with shadow and the strains of Armide echoing from the orchestra playing at the railing above the entrance. Pleydon, together with a great many others, had spread an overcoat on the masonry of the steps, and they were seated in the obscurity of the balustrade.
“You look as though you hadn't had enough to eat,” she observed. “You used to be almost thick but now you are a thing of terrifying grimness. You look like a monk. I wonder why you're like a monk, Dodge?”
“Linda Condon,” he replied.
“That can't be it now; I haven't been Linda Condon for years, but Mrs. Arnaud Hallet. It's very pretty, of course, and I'd like to think you could keep a young love alive so long. Experience makes me doubt anything of the sort; but then I was always skeptical.”