“You have a gift, Rose. I was always awkward on that turn. I never understood it before. But when you get it, like most other things, it’s easy.”
“Horatia thinks we are silly, Jim.”
“Horatia is right. We are silly.”
He took Horatia out on the floor and they danced well, silently, but without abandon.
“I love you,” whispered Langley.
Horatia’s voice was low as she answered:
“Ah, but I love you—utterly—completely.”
Perhaps then Langley longed for the chance to take off ten years of his age as men do long once in a lifetime when a great opportunity comes too late. How was he to explain—or fully understand himself—that only in the strength of very young emotions is everything else automatically shut out except the emotions themselves and that later the beauty is in relating love to a life already known?
CHAPTER X
HORATIA made another effort to stop Anthony. She found herself disturbed beyond all control by this love of his. It seemed to her that such a thing had no right to exist in the same world with her feeling for Jim. She did not want to hurt Anthony—she did not want to argue about his love. She merely wanted his love not to exist—not to be there to affront her. If ever a woman’s psychology was pure in trying to arrest the affections of a man, Horatia’s was. So it was not enough to refuse Anthony. He must be recreated into the jolly friend that he had been. She would not have him as a lover. All this she tried to tell him and of course in the telling she laid herself open to misconstruction.