Years hence in rustic speech a phrase,
As in rude earth a Grecian vase.
And then, that wet, discouraged day in February, and the vision of Eva Atkinson, radiantly fresh and happy, kept young and pretty by unlimited money and time.
"Her children were so pretty," said Phyllis wistfully, "and mine, dear little villains, were such dirty, untaught, rude little things—oh, it sounds snobbish, but I'd have given everything I had to have a dainty, clean little lady-child throw her arms around me and kiss me, instead of my pet little handsome, sticky Polish Jewess. Up at home everything had been so clean and old and still that you always could remember it had been finished for three hundred years. And Father's clean, still old library——"
Phyllis did not know how she was revealing to Allan the unconscious motherhood in her; but Allan, femininely sensitive to unspoken things from his long sojourn in the dark—Allan did. It was the mother-instinct that she was spending on him, but mother-instinct of a kind he had never known before; gayly self-effacing, efficient, shown only in its results. And she could never have anything else to spend it on, he thought. Well, he was due to die in a few years.... But he didn't want to. Living was just beginning to be interesting again, somehow. There seemed no satisfactory solution for the two of them.... Well, he'd be unselfish and die, any way. Meanwhile, why not be happy? Here was Phyllis. His hand clasped hers more closely.
"And when Mr. De Guenther made me that offer," she murmured, coloring in the darkness, "I was tired and discouraged, and the years seemed so endless! It didn't seem as though I'd be harming any one—but I wouldn't have done it if you'd said a word against it—truly I wouldn't, dear."
The last little word slipped out unnoticed. She had been calling her library children "dear" for a year now, and the word slipped out of itself. But Allan liked it.
"My poor little girl!" he said. "In your place I'd have married the devil himself—up against a life like that."
"Then—then you don't—mind?" asked Phyllis anxiously, as she had asked before.
"No, indeed!" said Allan, with a little unnecessary firmness. "I told you that, didn't I? I like it."
"So you did tell me," she said penitently.