"Come to this address to-morrow afternoon and bring the rest of your poetry with you," said Delafield, "I have an engagement at nine. May I keep this one till you come?"—he shook the foolscap significantly. The boy hesitated, almost imperceptibly, then nodded. As Delafield left the little table he did not rise with him, but sat with his eyes fixed on the smoke-rings.
"They do not teach courtesy in the night-schools, evidently," mused the older man, peering for a cab; "but one can't have everything. My manners have been on occasion commended—but I can't write poetry like that."
He tasted in advance the pleasure of reading the poem to Anne: how her brown eyes would dilate and glow, how eagerly her long, slender fingers would clasp and unclasp. People called her cold, they told him; for his part he never could see why. True, she was not kittenish, like the other nieces; she didn't try to flirt with her old uncle, as Ellen's girls did; but what an enthusiasm for fine things, what a quick, keen mind the child had! Child—Anne was twenty-five by now. Was it true that she might never marry? Ellen said—but then Ellen was always a little jealous of poor Anne's money. The girl couldn't help her legacies. Still, at twenty-five—perhaps it was true that she expected too much, thought too seriously, reasoned morbidly that they were after her money.
Seated opposite her in his favourite oak chair, looking with a sudden impersonal appraisal at the slender figure in clinging black lace, the cool pallor of the face under the smooth dark hair, the rope of pearls that hung from her firm, girlish shoulders, it dawned on him that there was something wanting in this not quite sufficiently charming piece of womanhood. She was too black-and-white, too unswerving, too unflushed by life. Humanity, with its countless moulding and colouring touches, seemed to slip away from either side of her, like the waves from some proud young prow, and fall behind.
"Yet she's not unsympathetic—I swear she's not!" he thought, as her eyes glowed to the poem and her lips parted delightedly.
"'And moored at last in some pale bay'—Uncle Les, isn't that beautiful! Not that it's really so fine as the first part, but it's easier to remember. And he was hungry? Oh, oh! And you discovered him, didn't you?"
He nodded complacently.
"I'll bring you around the rest of the things to-morrow. I knew you'd enjoy this, Anne. You love—really love—this sort of thing, don't you?"
She nodded eagerly.
"But nothing else? Nobody—you don't think that perhaps you're letting—after all, my dear, life is something more than the beautiful things you surround yourself with—pictures and music and poetry, and all that. It really is. There is so much——"