“You are too much alike,” he shrewdly observed. “It is laughable at times. Did you expect your children to be fountains of sentiment? And, look here—if I can get along in comfort with you for life you in particular ought to put up peacefully with Lowrie. He is a damned sight more human than, at bottom, you are; a woman of alabaster.”
“I loathe quarrels,” she admitted; “they are so vulgar. You know that they are not like me and just said so. Oh, Arnaud, why does life get harder instead of easier?”
He put his book aside completely and gazed at her in patient thought. “Linda,” he said finally, “I have never heard anything that stirred me so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognition in your voice.” A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; an ineffable desire as vain as the passion she struggled to give him in return. She smiled in an unhappiness of apology.
“Perhaps—” he stopped, waiting any assurance whatever, his face eager like a dusty lamp in which the light had been turned sharply up. She was unable to stir, to move her gaze from his hopeful eyes, to mitigate by a breath her slender white aloofness. A smile different from hers, tender with remission, lingered in his fading irradiation. The dusk was gathering, adding its melancholy to his age—sixty-five now. Why that was an old man! Her sympathy vanished in her shrinking from the twilight that was, as well, slowly, inevitably, deepening about her.
It was laughable that, as she approached an age whose only resource was tranquillity, she grew more restless. Her present vague agitation belonged ridiculously to youth. The philosophy of the evident that had supported her so firmly was breaking at the most inopportune time. And it was, she told herself, too late for anything new; the years for that had been spent insensibly with Arnaud. Linda was very angry with herself, for, in all her shifting state of mind, she preserved an inner necessity for the quality of exactness expressed in her clothes. There were literally no neglected spaces in her conscious living.
Her thoughts finally centered about the statue in Hesperia—it presented an actual mark for her fleeting resentments. She wondered why it so largely occupied her thoughts, moved her so personally. She watched the papers for the scattered reports of the progress of the contention it had roused, some ill-natured, others supposedly humorous, and nearly all uninformed. She became, Arnaud said, the champion of the esthetic against Dagon. He elaborated this picture until she was forced to smile against her inclination, her profound seriousness. Linda had the feeling that she, too, was on the pedestal that held the bronze effigy of Simon Downige challenging the fog that obscured men. Its fate was hers. She didn't pretend to explain how.
As time passed it seemed to her that it took her longer and longer to dress in the morning, while her preparations couldn't be simpler; her habit of deliberation had become nearly a vice, the precision of her ruffles, her hair, a tyranny. She never quite lost the satisfaction of her mirror's faultless reflection; and stopped, now, for a moment's calm interrogation of the being—hardly more silvery cool than the reality—before her.
Arnaud was at the table, and the gaze with which he met her was troubled. The morning paper, she saw, was, against custom, at her place, and she picked it up with an instinctive sense of calamity. The blackly printed sensational headline that immediately established her fear sank vivid and entire into her brain: an anonymous inflamed mob in Hesperia had pulled down and destroyed Pleydon's statue. Their act was described as a tribute to the liberality of the present Downige family in the light of its objection to the monument.
As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of crashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground. Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard, with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He paid—but perhaps only naturally—no attention to her, suffering dully from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless approaching voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with terror; she felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her, the rending brutality of force—
She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juice from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of her mother. Arnaud was speaking, “I'm afraid this will cut through Pleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique power. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little files and countless finite improvements. The mold, I think, was broken. What a piece of luck the thing's at Cottarsport.” He paused, obviously expecting her to comment; but suddenly phrases failed her.