Claudia laughed lightly.
“Why in the middle of the night? Why were you moved to be so melodramatic?” She often teased him and made him angry by saying that he ought to have been an actor. For Frank Hamilton had a torch of the woman in him which clothed in drama many things that he did and said. Whether he was conscious of these effects or whether they came naturally to his character Claudia could never determine.
“I had been dreaming of you,” he said simply. “I had seen you standing at the foot of my bed, looking down on me, and I knew exactly how I should have painted you. So I sprang out of bed and hacked the beastly canvas to pieces. Afterwards I made a rough charcoal sketch of you from memory. To-night you look as you did when you stood at the foot of my bed.” The eyes of the man were audacious, but the words were spoken very quietly.
“I beg to remark that my frock is brand new,” rejoined Claudia flippantly. “I have never worn it even in dream-land. It is hard to be deprived of a positively first appearance when frocks are so ruinously expensive.”
“You looked wonderful that night,” he went on dreamily. “I have always seen you since—as you might look.”
“As I might look,” she repeated, her curiosity getting the better of her discretion. “What do you mean by that?”
He was looking out at the glistening streets, at the flakes of snow beginning to fall again, and he made no reply. This piqued her the more, and she repeated her question.
“I suppose you will be angry with me,” he said slowly. “Women always resent these things. I don’t know why.... As you might look if you were not so proud and if your brain did not rule your heart, if you would let yourself be the woman—you were meant to be.”
Claudia wanted to say “How ridiculous!” but she couldn’t. The motor was passing a large burial ground, the tombstones showing by the railings like dreary grey ghosts in the darkness, shut in with the wet, dripping trees, and looking hungrily at life passing a few yards away. Underneath those tombstones were hearts and brains in silent decay that had once been men and women. Claudia watched them flit by and she was silent now. She wondered if those tombstones had a message for her. Were not the dead saying “Live! live! live! Death started out to meet as soon as you were born.”
The man beside her commenced to quote softly, almost in a whisper: