“Mostly I can't realize it, it's too good to be true—you seem like a thing I dreamed about, in a dream all full of moonlight and white flowers. It's funny but I smell lilacs, you know like you picked, everywhere. Last night, cleaning a car just soaked in dirt and greasy smells, that perfume came out of nothing, and hung about so real that it hurt me. And all the time I kept thinking that you were standing beside me and smiling. I knew better, but I had to look more than once.
“Love's different from what I thought it would be; I thought it would be all happy, but it's not that, it's blamed serious. I am always flinching from blows that might fall on you, do you see? Before I went away I saw a man kiss a woman, and they both seemed scared; I understand that now—they loved each other.”
He broke off and gazed out the narrow window over the feathery tops of maples, the symmetrical, bronze tops of a clump of pines. The odor of lilacs came to him illusively; he was certain that Eliza was standing at his shoulder; he could hear a silken whisper, feel an intangible thrill of warmth. He turned sharply, and faced the empty room, the bright, stentorious clock, the table with the pitcher and glass and serious volumes. “Hell!” he exclaimed in angry remonstrance at his credulity. Still shaken by the reality of the impression he wondered if he were growing crazy? The bell above the washstand rang sharply, and, putting the incomplete letter in a drawer, he proceeded over the tanbark path that led to the house.
Annot Hardinge beckoned to him from the porch, and, turning, he passed a conservatory built against the side of the dwelling, where he saw small, identical plants ranged in mathematical rows.
“What is your name?” she demanded abruptly, as he stopped before her. “Anthony,” he told her.
She was dressed in apricot muslin, with a long necklace of alternate carved gold and amber beads, dependent amber earrings, and a flapping white hat with broad, yellow ribbands that streamed downward with her hair. In one hand she held a pair of crumpled white gloves and a soft gold mesh bag.
“You may bring around the car... Anthony,” she directed. “I want to go into town.”
In the heart of the shopping district they moved slowly in an unbroken procession of motor landaulets, open cars and private hansoms, a glittering, colorful procession winding through the glittering, colorful cavern of the shop windows. The sidewalks were thronged with women, brilliant in lace and dyed feathers and jewels, the thin, sustained babble of trivial voices mingled with the heavy, coiling odors of costly perfumes.
When a small heap of bundles had been accumulated a rebellious expression clouded An-not Hardinge's countenance. “Stop at that confectioner's,” she directed, indicating a window filled with candies scattered in a creamy tide, bister, pale mauve, and citrine, over fluted, delicately green satin, against a golden mass of molasses bars. She soon emerged, with a package tied in silver cord, and paused upon the curb. “I want to go out... out, into the heart of the country,” she proclaimed; “this crowd, these tinsel women, make me ill. Drive until I tell you to stop... away from everything.”
When they had left the tangle of paved streets, the innumerable stone façades, she directed their course into a ravine whose steep sides were covered with pines, at the bottom of which a stream foamed whitely over rocky ledges. Beyond, they rose to an upland, where open, undulating hills burned in the blue flame of noon; at their back a trail of dust resettled upon the road, before them a glistening flock of peafowl scattered with harsh, threatening cries. By a gnarled apple tree, whose ripening June apples overhung the road, she called, “stop!”