“That blind effort,” she continued, leaning forward, flushed with the warmth of her image, “all those men struggling, building in the dark, unable to see what they were accomplishing, or what part the others had. And then—oh! don't you see!—the great, snowy tent in the morning sun—a figure of the success, the reward, of all labor, all living.”
“How about the ones that loafed—didn't pull, or were drunk?”
“For all,” she insisted, “sober and drunk and shrinking. Can you think that any supreme judgment would be cheaply material, or in need of any of our penny abilities? do you suppose the supreme beauty has no standard higher than those practical minds that hold out heaven as a sort of reward for washed faces? Anthony,” it was the first time she had called him that, and it rang in his brain in a long peal of rapture, “if there isn't a heaven for every one, there isn't any at all. You, singing an idle song, must be as valuable as the greatest apostle to any supreme love, or else it isn't supreme, it isn't love.”
“You are so wonderfully good,” he muttered, “that you think every one else is good too.”
“But I'm hardly a bit good,” she assured him, “and I wouldn't be good if I could—in the Christian kind of way.” She gazed about with an affectation of secretiveness, then leaned across her coffee cup. “It would bore me horribly,” she confided, “that 'other cheek' thing; I'm not a grain humble; and I spend a criminal amount of money on my clothes. I have even put a patch upon my cheek to be a gin and stumbling-block to a young man.”
She had!
He surveyed with absurd pleasure that minute black crescent on the pale rose of her countenance. If she had been good before she was adorable now: her confession had drawn her out of the transplendid cloud where he had elevated her down to his side; she was infinitely more desirable, more warmly and delightfully human.
“I have been asking about you,” she told him later, with a slight frown; “the accounts are, well—various. I don't mind your—your friends of the stables, Anthony; they are, what Ellerton will never learn, the careless choice of a born aristocrat; I don't care a Tecla pearl whether you are 'a steady young man' or not. And one doesn't hear a whisper of meanness about you anywhere. But I have an exaggerated affection for things that are beautiful, I suppose it's a weakness, really, and ugly people or surroundings, harsh voices even, terrify me. The thought of cruelty makes me cold. And, since you will come into my thoughts, and smile your funny little smile at me out of walls and other impossible places, I should like to picture you, not in pool rooms, but on the hills that you know so well. I should like to think of your mind echoing with the rush of those streams, the hunting of those owls, you told me about, and not sounding with coarse and silly and brutal words and ideas.”
“It echoes with you,” he replied, “and you are more beautiful than hills and streams.”
For a moment she held his gaze full in the blue depths of her vision; then, with a troubled smile, evaded it. “I'm a patched jade,” she announced.