With Annot, Anthony reflected, he was everlastingly getting into new situations; she seemed to lift him out of the ordinary course of events into a perverse world of her own, a front-backward land where the unexpected, without rule or obligation, continually happened; and, what was strangest of all, without any of the dark consequences which he had been taught must inevitably follow such departures. He recalled the incredulous smiles, the knowing insinuations, that would have greeted the exact recounting of the past night at Doctor Allhop's drugstore. He would himself, in the past, have regarded such a tale as a flimsy fabrication. And suddenly he perceived dimly, in a mind unused to such abstractions, the veil of ugliness, of degradation, that hung so blackly about the thoughts of men. He gazed with a new sympathy and comprehension at the scornful line of Annot's vivid young lips; something of her superiority, her contempt, was communicated to him.
She became aware of his searching gaze, and smiled in an intimate, friendly fashion at him. “You are the most comfortable person alive,” she told him. There was nothing critical in her tones now. “I said that you were not a good chauffeur, and—” the surroundings grew familiar, they had nearly reached their destination, and an impalpable reserve fell upon her, but she continued to smile at him, “and... you are not.” That was the last word she addressed to him that day.
As, later, he sluiced the automobile with water, he recalled the strange intimacy of the night, her warm and sympathetic voice; once she had steadied herself with a clinging hand upon his shoulder. These new attributes of the person who, shortly, passed him silently and with cold eyes, stirred his imagination; they were potent, rare, unsettling.
XLIII
Notwithstanding, in the days which followed there was a perceptible change in Annot's attitude toward him: she became, as it were, conscious of his actuality. One afternoon she read aloud to him a richly-toned, gloomy tale of Africa. They were sitting by a long window, open, but screened from the summer heat by stiff, darkly-drooping green folds, where they could hear the drip of the fountain in its basin, a cool punctuation on the sultry page of the afternoon. Annot proceeded rapidly in an even, low voice; she was dressed in filmy lavender, with little buttons of golden velvet, an intricately carved gold buckle at her waist.
Anthony listened as closely as possible, the faint smile which seldom left him hovering over his lips. The bald action of the narrative—a running fight with ambushed savages from a little tin pot of a steamer, a mysterious affair in the darkness with a grim skeleton of a fellow, stakes which bore a gory fruitage of human heads, held him; but the rest... words, words. His attention wavered, fell upon minute, material objects; Annot's voice grew remote, returned, was lost among his juggling thoughts.
“Isn't it splendid!” she exclaimed, at last closing the volume; “the most beautiful story of our time—” She stopped abruptly, and cast a penetrating glance at him. “I don't believe you even listened,” she declared. “In your heart you prefer, 'Tortured by the Tartars.'”
His smile broadened, including his eyes.