CHAPTER XXII — A SCARLET FLAME IN THE SKY
From the night Overman had taken dinner at the Gramercy Park house he became a constant visitor.
For six months he had usually spent two or three evenings each week in his friend’s library, rehearsing their boyhood days, discussing new books, art and politics, Socialism and religion.
Overman’s cynicism had piqued Kate’s curiosity and opened new views of things she had accepted as moral finalities.
At these battles of wit she was always a charmed listener. She seemed never to tire watching the sparks fly in the rapier thrust of mind in these two men of steel and listening with a shiver to the deep growl of the animal behind their words. The one, so homely he was fascinating, with massive neck, and enormous mouth pursing and twisting under excitement into a sneer that pushed his big nose upward, the incarnation of a battle-scarred bulldog; the other, with his giant figure, hands and feet, his leonine face and locks, his deep voice, handsome and insolent in his conscious strength, the picture of a thoroughbred mastiff.
With the grace of a goddess she would sit and watch this battle to the death in the arena of thought.
Overman had keenly interested her from the first, and she stimulated him to unusual brilliancy. His remorseless logic, his thorough scholarship, his grasp of history, his savage common sense presented so sharp a contrast to the idealism of Gordon, she was shocked and startled.
He fell into the habit of calling on Sunday mornings and walking with them to the Opera House. They would leave Gordon at the stage entrance and sit together during the services.
He would comment softly to her on many of the little absurdities of the preacher’s flights of sentiment, and often convulsed her with laughter by a single word or phrase which made ridiculous his mysticism. He did this with his single eye fixed on Gordon without the quiver of a nerve or the movement of a muscle to indicate ought but profound rapture in the speaker and his message.