His match, the third he had struck, blew out before it had lighted his cigarette, and he threw it away with a petulant gesture. He did not answer her, as he was again attempting to light his cigarette, this time with success. Then he began to saunter about the room.
In spite of her penury Perdita had yet managed to invest her little workshop with both daintiness and charm. The walls were hung with pink and white chintz and here and there were bits of fragile china and rare old silver on claw-legged mahogany tables, while from dim canvases in tarnished silver frames smiled the sweet, dark eyes of haughty southern beauties of a generation unused to life's struggles.
"You really saved some of the best things from that hideous auction, didn't you?" picking up a bit of china to scrutinize it more carefully. "I was horrified when I heard of it across the world, several months after it was all over. If I'd only been there to buy the whole lot in. Plucky little girl you were, Perdita, to come on here and manage to keep the gaunt, gray wolf at bay."
"What else was there for me to do?" she asked without turning her head. "Aunt died, the place had to go. As for the wolf, if you look sharp, Eugene, you may see his paws thrusting under this door."
In the center of the room was a large table covered with paint brushes, colors, a litter of candle shades, cotillion favors and cards in various stages of completion. Eugene carefully cleared a space on that edge of the table nearest Perdita's chair, and perched upon it, looking down at her with a smile.
"My stars, Dita!" he cried with the truest conviction, "you are a beauty! The moment I return, I mean to paint you again. And this time I'll set the world afire. Do you remember how many portraits I have made of you? Why, just to see you brings back my boyhood,—the hopes, the struggles, the effort, the haunted days, the feverish nights. I used to think, 'If I can just learn how to get this effect, I'll know the whole secret.' I've got past that now. There's always a new and more difficult riddle every day. But Dita, Dita, the dreams of my youth you recall!"
The smile died from her face. Her eyes grew wistful. "The dreams of our youth," she repeated. "I'm young yet; but they haunt me. They were beautiful dreams down there on that gray, old river. Can't you shut your eyes, Eugene, and see the terraces sloping down to the water, the lovely, neglected garden with its tangle of roses and jasmine?"
"Do I remember?" His eyes looked deep into hers. "I swear I never smell jasmine without thinking of the old place and you. Perdita, do you ever think what life might have been for us if it hadn't been for our accursed poverty? If we'd only had just a little between us. It's a question of courage. If we'd only had the courage to face things hand in hand we'd have got along somehow, I dare say. But we didn't have that quality, did we? We didn't believe enough in our dreams. That's the worst of life. She won't let you."
"Oh, the dreams!" she scoffed. Her color remained high, her eyes glittered, but with irritation, not tears. She suffered from an old laceration of the heart, the more wounding in that, for pride's sake, she must ever deny it expression. Eugene always took the attitude as if they together had renounced a mutual love, and often implied, without rancor, but with a forgiving, almost understanding tenderness, that the responsibility of their marred lives lay on her shoulders.
Perdita was of the twentieth century, but she was also a southern woman of many traditions, and she could not say the words which rose to her defensive lips: "Eugene, you have never asked me to face life hand in hand with you." He would with a glance, she could see it, feel it, convict her of blunted intuitions, of an inability to discern exquisite shades of emotion; and then he would express his love for her in glowing, passionate phrases, confusingly evasive, elusive beyond definition, committing himself to nothing.