“Certainly,” she answered. “It has been very warm all day—it will be cool on the water.”
Dimitrius bethought himself of one of the teachings of the Rosicrucians: “Whoso is indifferent obtains all good. The more indifferent you are, the purer you are, for to the indifferent, all things are One!”
Some unusual influence there was radiating from her presence like a fine air filled with suggestions of snow. It was cold, yet bracing, and he drew a long breath as of a man who had scaled some perilous mountain height and now found himself in a new atmosphere. She walked beside him with a light swiftness that was almost aerial—his own movements seemed to him by comparison abnormally heavy and clumsy. Seeking about in his mind for some ordinary subject on which to hang a conversation, he could find nothing. His wits had become as clumsy as his feet. Pushing her hood a little aside, she looked at him.
“You had a garden-party to-day?” she queried.
“Yes,—if a few people to tea in the gardens is a garden-party,” he answered.
“That’s what it is usually called,” said Diana, carelessly. “They are generally very dull affairs. I thought so, when I watched your guests from my window—they did not seem amused.”
“You cannot amuse people if they have no sense of amusement,” he rejoined. “Nor can you interest them if they have no brains. They walked among miracles of beauty—I mean the roses and other flowers—without looking at them; the sunset over the Alpine range was gorgeous, but they never saw it—their objective was food—that is to say, tea, coffee, cakes and ices—anything to put down the ever open maw of appetite. What would you? They are as they are made!”
She offered no comment.
“And you,” he continued in a voice that grew suddenly eager and impassioned—“You are as you are made!—as I have made you!”
She let her hood fall back and turned her face fully upon him. Its fairness, with the moonlight illumining it, was of spiritual delicacy, and yet there was something austere in it as in the face of a sculptured angel.