Once a week, or oftener, Christiansen took her somewhere with him, to hear some music, to see a play, or to meet some interesting people. Their friendship had developed until it was the very centre of her life, but it brought with it the usual toll. It loosed all the wants of her nature; needs and demands she had not dreamed of sprang into being, into urgency. She wanted love, children, a mate. The old intellectual satisfactions were gone, swept away on the tide of these new emotions.
No thought of Martin Christiansen entered her head, in this relation. She thought of him as one of the gods, high above, upon remote peaks, descending now and then to help and inspire some stumbling mortal, even as he had rescued her. She knew him as the perfect friend, and as such she valued him.
It was the confluence of all these causes which made her drop her mask for a second, when Jerry called her high priestess of the home.
"I had a letter from the Bryce Cricket to-day. She sent her love to you," he said, changing the subject.
"Thanks. She writes you, does she?"
"Yes, the little idiot."
"Are her parents back yet?"
"You begin the portraits then?"
"I suppose so."