"That is just it. What is his place?"
"Sylvia!" Felicia's tone was faintly exasperated. "You are no more in love with Jack Amidon than I am. Some day you will wake up and find it out."
"Will I? Sometimes, Felicia, I have a horrible suspicion I am just a taster--like tea tasters, you know. Only I like to go round tasting experience. I never thought I was a bit of a flirt until lately. But I'm just finding out there are ways and ways of flirting, having 'adventures in personality' as Suzanne calls it. Jack says my 'Damnable sympathetic ways' are vicious. Maybe they are. I think I must be a sort of chameleon--all things to all men, you know. I shouldn't wonder if I couldn't really love anybody--grand style."
"You goose! When the right man comes along you will know the difference."
"I wonder." And suddenly Sylvia remembered how she had felt that night on Lover's Leap, when she and Philip Lorrimer had been the only two individuals in a whole spacious, shining universe. It seemed now as if she had heard a kind of Hallelujah chorus, or was it that the silence had been a strange kind of music itself?
And then on the heels of this blinding sweet memory had come another, bringing with it a bitter taste, a memory of those long days after Phil had gone back to the city and she had watched the mails and pretended to ignore them.
And then she remembered Gus and Jack and Doctor Tom. Had they all been just understudies for somebody else she really wanted in her heart of hearts? How many other understudies would there be? And would she marry one of them sooner or later?
"Women are rather like cats, after all, aren't they, Felicia? They will pat their mice and keep putting their paws on them, even if they don't want to eat them."
Felicia laughed.
"What a traveler you are! Have you been half round the world since you spoke last? Shall we ask Tom and Lois over to dinner to-night? We haven't seen either of them for an age."