"What book have you been reading?" he asked quietly—yet feeling a little sad that he could not follow where her lawless imagination ran.
She turned away hotly, clenching her fists, crying:
"Ah, you will never let go of yourself! You are afraid—afraid of everything!"
He followed her, laying a hand on her shoulder as she stood by the window.
"Keep your island in southern seas!" he said, with such emotion in his voice that she wheeled about. "Believe in it all you want, extraordinary child, even if it ends by my paying all the penalty. Go on with your day-dreaming."
His glance lay in hers, his arms were longing to take her into them, when Snyder entered, with a quick knock that gave them only time to spring apart. At this moment Dodo could have driven her out, fiercely rebelling against this constant espionage. What right had Snyder or any one to interfere with her liberty, or to say whom she should see? She resolved hotly to have an explanation when she returned. Now it was necessary to master her emotion.
"A moment—a moment to change my dress; ready in ten minutes!"
She ran quickly to trunk and bureau, gathering up her articles of dress; disappearing behind a screen in the corner. Massingale, after a calculating glance at the figure of Snyder, rigid in the window, sat down, drawing a magazine to him. He no longer felt the unease he had experienced at the woman's first interruption. It seemed so natural to be there, in the musty high room, littered with trunks, with its patches of carpet and incongruous wall-paper.
In the closet, behind a discreetly closed door, Dodo was laughing at her narrow quarters. Outside, through the windows, the marshaled city was setting its lights for Christmas Eve—thousands on thousands of human beings disciplined under the old order of what is called right and wrong, the millions who never really entered his life and for whose approval his every word and action must be calculated.
"Snyder, come and button me!" called Dodo, emerging from the closet behind the screen.