With an unconscious, but very expressive, little gesture of reprobation Anastasia moved across to the embrasure of the near window, pleasant from the fresh, pungent scent of a bank of white and lemon-colored chrysanthemums. She looked up into the limpid clarity of the twilight sky seen above the house-roofs on the opposite side of the quiet street.
... Yes, the perpetual shifting of the human scene, the instability of human purpose. And, as concrete example of all that, a portrait of gentle, shrinking, timid, pre-eminently old-world Madame Vernois on exhibition in New York! The shouting incongruity of the proposition! Would her daughter, la belle Gabrielle, entertain it? And there, as Anastasia confessed to herself, she ran up against the provoking cause of her quarrel with existing conditions and tendencies. For, of the two living persons whom she had recently come to hold dearest, wasn't the one changed and the other absent?
Since that pleasant afternoon at Ste. Marie she had neither sight nor word of Adrian Savage. The young man appeared to have incontinently vanished. She rang up his office in the rue Druot. The good Konski replied over the telephone, "Monsieur was, alas! encore en voyage." She rang up his home address in the rue de l'Université, only to receive the same response; supplemented by the information that Adrian had not notified the date of his return, nor left orders as to the forwarding of his letters. What did this mean? She became anxious.
"Lenty has worried quite a wearing amount," Byewater was saying, "whether it would be suitable he should ask you to let him work up a portrait. I tell you, Madame St. Leger, Lenty's silver-point is just a dream. Do not go thinking it is because I am his friend I judge it so. Mr. Dax positively enthused when he saw some samples last fall; and Lenty has broken his own record since then—"
Anastasia, still consulting the calm evening sky, began to play a quite other than calm little fantasia with the fingers of one hand upon the window-pane. For why, in the name of diplomacy, of logic, of Eros himself, had Adrian Savage elected to vanish at this moment of all conceivable moments? The goal of his ambitions was in sight—hadn't she told him as much at Ste. Marie? Eros awaiting, as she believed, to crown him victor in the long, faithful fight. And then that he, the dear, exasperating young idiot, should gallop off thus, the Lord only knew whither, instead of claiming the enchanting fruit of his victory! Really, it was too wildly irritating. For la belle Gabrielle wasn't pleased—not a bit of it. She resented his absence at this particular juncture, as any woman of spirit not unreasonably must. Only too probably she would make him pay for his apparent slight of her. And to what extent would she make him pay? Faster and faster grew the time of the fantasia upon the window-pane, for this question greatly disturbed Anastasia.
For if Adrian must be cited as an example of the absent, la belle Gabrielle must be cited as among the changed. Miss Beauchamp, who watched her with affectionate solicitude, perceived something was a little bit wrong with her. She was not quite contented, not quite happy. Her manner had lost its delightful repose, her beauty, though great, its high serenity. Her wit had a sharp edge to it. She avoided occasions of intimacy. To-day she had helped Anastasia receive; and the latter remarked that, during the whole course of the afternoon, men had gathered about her and that she flirted—gracefully—yet undeniably—with each and all in turn. Since her return to Paris she had discarded the last outward signs of mourning. The smoke-gray walking-suit she wore to-day was lavishly embroidered in faint pastel shades of mauve, turquoise, and shell-pink, the pattern outlined here and there in silver thread, which glinted slightly as she moved. The same delicate tones tipped the panache of smoke-gray ostrich plumes set at the side of her large black hat. In this donning of charming colors Anastasia read the signing of some private declaration of independence, some assertion, not only of her youth and youth's acknowledged privilege of joyous costume, but of intention to make capital out of the admiration her youth and beauty excited after the manner of other fair mondaines.
Clearly Madame St. Leger had arrived at a definite and momentous parting of the ways. Her mourning, all which it implied and which went along with it, was a thing of the past. Her nature was too rich—let it be added, too normal and wholesome—for the senses not to play their part in the shaping of her destiny. She had coquetted with Feminism, it is true; but such appeals and opportunities as Feminism has to offer the senses are not of an order wholesome natures can accept. To Gabrielle those appeals and opportunities were, briefly, loathsome; while, in her existing attitude, an exclusively intellectual fanaticism—such as alone can render advanced Feminism morally innocuous—no longer could control or satisfy her. Against it her ironic and critical humor rebelled, making sport of it. It followed, therefore, as Anastasia saw, that la belle Gabrielle would inevitably seek satisfaction, scope for her young energies, for her unimpaired joy of living, elsewhere. And this signaled possible danger. For, just now, being piqued, as Anastasia believed, and pushed by wounded pride, she might commit a folly. She might marry the wrong man, marry for position merely, or for money. Plenty of aspirants, judging by this afternoon, needed but little encouragement to declare themselves. She had borne the trials of one loveless marriage bravely, without faintest breath of scandal or hint of disaster. Throughout she had been admirable, both in taste and in conduct. But what about a second loveless marriage, made now in the full bloom of her womanhood?
Miss Beauchamp's fingers positively drummed upon the window. For she had come to love them both so closely, love them foolishly, even weakly, much—perhaps—this very attractive young couple, of whom the one, just now, was absent, the other changed! Beyond measure would it grieve her if the consummation of their romance should be frustrated or should come about other than quite honest and noble lines. Why, oh! why, in Heaven's name, did Adrian Savage absent himself? Why, at this eminently psychologic moment, was he not here? Anastasia could have wept.
Then, becoming aware of footsteps, and some presence entering from the hall behind her, she turned round hastily to find herself confronted by Adrian himself.
"Enfin!" she cried, enthusiastically. "What an inexpressible relief to see you, my dear Savage! You discover me in the very act of exhaling my doubtfully pious soul in prayers for your speedy return. You are late, in some respects perhaps dangerously late; but 'better late than never'—immeasurably better in this connection. Only, pardon me, where on earth have you been?"