His arm was round her shoulders; and putting up one hand she touched his face.
"Why . . because I said we would have to begin with the House. But we seem to have reached the Enchanted Palace before starting after all?"
"By a very roundabout route," he answered, a suspicion of the old sadness in his eyes.
"Yes; but we have reached it. That's the main point, dear Pessimist; and the commonplace House I offered you has tumbled into a dust-heap of ruins. Don't let's build it up again, whatever else we may do in the way of foolishness. Retrogression is the one unforgiveable sin!"
It is the instinctive cry of love in the first flush of fulfilment. The grand impulsion of man to woman brushes aside lesser considerations like so many flies. But Life and Temperament, standing discreetly in the background, will have their say in the 'fateful second act' of the human comedy before the curtain drops.
CHAPTER XXVI.
"Climb high, love high, what matter! Still . . .
Feet, feelings, must descend the hill."
—Browning.
On a certain afternoon of early March, Quita Lenox stood at her easel, in the small room she had fitted up as a studio, palette in one hand, long-handled brush in the other, two broken lines of irritation between her brows.
The verandah door stood wide; and through it the breath of spring came in to her, velvet soft, compact of a hundred nameless scents, mingled with the paramount scent of roses. For March is India's rose month: and in the midst of so much that is unlovely, the roses of Dera Ishmael Khan are things to marvel at, and thank Heaven for. Quita's rambling compound was packed with them, from the plebeian Cabbage, to the lordly Maréchal Neil. Three golden buds of the latter drooped over the white ribbon bow at her waist: and a bowl of dark red ones stood on the untidy table behind her.
But even the subtle-sweet influence of the day failed to sooth the creases out of her forehead. For the panel picture on her easel would not 'behave'; her scattered ideas refused to range themselves: and the fount of inspiration seemed dried up within her: trifles insignificant enough to the 'lay' mind: but for the artist, whether of pencil, or brush, or chisel, they spell despair. All the morning she had wrestled with the picture half defiantly, as it were against the stream. Such work is seldom satisfactory; and since lunch she had been engaged in blotting it all out ruthlessly, bit by bit.