“If she thinks I am going after, she’s mistaken,” he thought bitterly.
Perceiving that he had seen her, she checked her movement of flight and presently came over to his table, nodded, and sat down. He saw the furrowed pain on her face and the torment in her eyes, and divined the day of suffering through which she had passed. A sudden lightening of the spirit flashed through him, scattering the bitter clouds of dejection. He felt an uncontrollable gaiety, a leaping of the pulses, a need of laughter, of singing out loud, of music, and of sunlight. All his doubts vanished in a pervading sense of peace and serenity. For he knew that she loved him.
Yet they did not speak a word of what lay nearest to their hearts. Gregory, the young student, served them, and tarried to discuss political developments in Russia. Dangerfield, in fine feather, disputed eloquently, opposing his Tolstoyan theories of non-resistance. The transition from moroseness to ecstatic gaiety was so swift that he felt an impulse to work.
“What a pity I haven’t a sketching pad!” he said ruefully.
Gregory hastened to supply him paper and pencil. He laughed and began a series of rapid sketches of the oyster-openers; Mother Trekanova at the counter; a silhouette of a young Jewish girl in tinsel finery with an old rabbi watching in critical disapprobation. Inga, her hands clasped in front of her, continued to stare at the table-cloth, scarcely raising her glance.
Dangerfield completed a dozen sketches and sprang up lightly and satisfied, his mind busy with projects for paintings. Everything attracted him; the whole world was rich with points of interest—a black-haired woman leaning out of the window drying her hair, two young mothers with babies at their shoulders chatting before a kosher shop, a public school pouring out its color-flecked stream of alien races—all these notes of humanity seemed to him vibrant with the teeming will to live, to enjoy, and to drink in sensations to the fullest. He began to talk in long, loquacious periods, as he seldom talked in his sober moods—of the things that lay about him to paint, of the new quarters which they should explore, planning what they would do in the spring and the summer months, eager to be off. For, of course, he took it for granted that her opposition had ended. His enthusiasm was so obvious that she could not fail to comprehend the cause. Several times she glanced at his radiant face, wistfully and seriously, then looked away over the house tops or deep into the city crowds. When they came to the Arcade, she stopped him, and looked him full in the face.
“Mr. Dan, you don’t understand.”
His face clouded abruptly.
“Understand? What do you mean by that? And why—” he glanced impatiently at the tenanted Arcade—“why say this to me here?”