“My daughter,” said Mr. May, with emphasis—“is in Geneva——”
“Was,” interrupted Diana. “And is—here!”
Mr. May gave a groan of utter despair.
“No use—no use!” he said. “One might as well argue with the wind as with one of these mentally obsessed persons! Perfectly hopeless!—hopeless——!”
Diana sprang off her sofa and stood erect, confronting him.
“See here!” she said—“When I lived at home with you, sacrificing all my time to you and my mother, and only thinking of my duty to you both, you found me ‘in the way.’ Why? Merely because I was growing old. You never thought there was any cruelty in despising me for a fault which seems common to all nature. You never cared to consider that you yourself were growing old!—no, for you still seek to play the juvenile and the amorous! What you men consider legitimate in your own sex, you judge ridiculous in ours. You look upon me as ‘young’—when in very truth I am of the age of the same Diana whom as your daughter you wearied of—but youth has been given to my ‘mature years’ in a way which you in your ignorance of all science would never dream of. You, like most men, judge by outward appearances only. The physical, which is perishable, attracts you—and you have no belief in the spiritual, which is imperishable. But the spiritual wins!”
Mr. May sat winking and blinking under this outburst, which was to him entirely incomprehensible, though he was uncomfortably conscious of the radiance of eyes that played their glances upon him like beams from fiery stars.
“There, there!” he said at last, nervously,—resorting to his usual soothing formula—“You are overwrought—a little hysterical—a sudden access of this—this unfortunate mistaken identity trouble. I will come back and talk to you another day——”
“Why should you come back?” she demanded. “What do you want of me?”
James Polydore was somewhat confused by this straight question. What indeed did he want of her? He was too much of a moral coward to formulate the answer, even to himself. She was beautiful, and he wanted to caress her beauty,—old as he was, he would have liked to kiss that exquisite mouth, curved like a rose-petal, and run his wrinkled fingers through the warm and lavish gold of the hair that waved over the white brow and small ears like rippling sunshine. He was afflicted by the disease of senile amourousness for all women—but for this one in particular he was ready and eager to go to all lengths of fatuous foolishness possible to an old man in love, if he could only have been sure she was not insane! While he stood hesitating, and twitching his eyelids in the peculiar “manner” he affected when he had thoughts to conceal, she answered her own question for him.