She smiled, and, without heed to his question, motioned him to a chair with a little gesture, not of her arm, but of her fingers, on which she wore several rings of unusual luster. She had, as a woman, that same magnetic self-consciousness that distinguishes the great actress, aware that every eye is focused on her and that the slightest change of her hand or shift of her head has an instantaneous importance.
Slade obeyed her with a sudden sense of warm content.
"Smoke?" he said, taking out a cigar. "Permission?"
He helped himself to a match, sunk himself in the great chair, crossed his legs, and looked at her.
Rita Kildair gave that complex appearance of a woman much younger than she seemed, or of a woman much older. She was at that mental phase in her life when she exhaled to the fullest that perfume of mystery which is the most feminine and irresistible of all the powers that a woman exerts over the masculine imagination, if indeed it is not the sum of all seductions. The inexplicable in her own life and individuality was heightened in every way by the subservience of outward things, whether by calculation or by an instinctive sense of interpretation.
The great studio, to the neglect of the electric chandelier, was lit by half a dozen candles, which flung about conflicting eddies of wavering lights and shadows. In farther corners were a divan, a piano, a portrait on an easel, lounges, waiting like so many shadows to be called forth. A standing lamp, not too near, bathed the couch on which she lay with a softened luster. Her tea-gown of liberty silk, with tones that changed and mingled with each other, was of the purple of the grape, an effect produced, too, by the superimposition of one filmy garment on the other. A slippered foot and ankle came forth from the fragrant disorder of the skirt, either by studied arrangement or by the impulse of a woman who is confident of all her poses. Her nose, quite the most individual feature, was aquiline, yet not such as is associated with a masculine character. Rather, it was vitally sensitive, and gave, in conjunction with the intent and instantaneous aspect of her grayish eyes, the instinctive, almost savage appetite for possession and sensation that is characteristic of her sex. No one looked at her without asking himself a question. Those who believed her under thirty wondered at the experiences that must have crowded in upon her. Those who believed her nearer forty still marveled at her mastery over youth. Those of an analytical mind left her always with a feeling of speculation framed in two questions—whence had she come and where would she end?
It was this latter speculation more than any other that absorbed Slade, irresistibly intrigued by the elusiveness of a fascination which he could not analyze. She endured his fixed glance without annoyance, absorbed, too, in the thoughts which his entrance had brought her. Finally, adapting her manner to his, she said with his own abruptness:
"Well, what do you want to say to me?"
"I'm wondering what you are after in this life, pretty lady?" he said directly.
"What do you want?"