And he was renouncing her.
He was painfully conscious of what he had missed, had lost—or had not yet found: the love of woman.
The sensation was curious—new, unique in his experience.
His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat pondering. Abstractedly, he ground its fire out in an ash-tray.
The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.
He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it justice. His dream troubled him—his dream of the love of woman.
From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air of disappointment. In the course of an hour and a half he awoke, to discover the attendant in the act of pouring very hot and black coffee from a bright silver pot into a demi-tasse of fragile porcelain. Kirkwood slipped a single lump of sugar into the cup, gave over his cigar-case to be filled, then leaned back, deliberately lighting a long and slender panetela as a preliminary to a last lingering appreciation of the scene of which he was a part.
He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with some slight surprise, seeming to see it with new vision, with eyes from which scales of ignorance had dropped.
This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet perfection of proportion and appointment, had always gratified his love of the beautiful; to-night it pleased him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the same as ever; its walls tinted a deep rose, with their hangings of dull cloth-of-gold, its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded, redoubled in half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of plate and glass, its soberly festive assemblage of circumspect men and women splendidly gowned, its decorously muted murmur of voices penetrated and interwoven by the strains of a hidden string orchestra—caressed his senses as always, yet with a difference. To-night he saw it a room populous with lovers, lovers insensibly paired, man unto woman attentive, woman of man regardful.
He had never understood this before. This much he had missed in life.