"Dearest," he had murmured that night to Conny, "you are wonderful,—woman and man,—the soul of a woman, the mind of a man! To love you is to love life."
And Conny, in whose ears the style of lover's sighs was immaterial, was stirred with an unaccountable feeling. When Cairy put his hand on hers, and his lips quivered beneath his mustache, her face inevitably softened and her eyes widened like a child's eyes. For Conny, even Conny, with her robust intelligence and strong will to grasp that out of life which seemed good to her, wanted to love—in a way she had never loved before. Like many women she had passed thirty with a husband of her choice, two children, and an establishment entirely of her making before she became aware that she had missed something on the way,—a something that other women had. She had seen Severine Wilson go white when a certain man entered the room—then light brilliantly with joy when his eyes sought her…. That must be worth having, too! …
Her relations with her husband were perfect,—she had said so for years and every one said the same thing about the Woodyards. They were very intimate friends, close comrades. She knew that Percy respected and admired her more than any woman in the world, and paid her the last flattery of conceding to her will, respecting her intelligence. But there was something that he had not done, could not do, and that was a something that Cairy seemed able to do,—give her a sensation partly physical, wholly emotional, like the effect of stimulant, touching every nerve. Conny, with her sure grasp of herself, however, had no mind to submit blindly to this intoxication; she would examine it, like other matters,—was testing it now in her capacious intelligence, as the man bent his eyes upon her, so close to her lips.
Had she only been the "other sort," the conventional ordinary sort, she would have either gulped her sensation blindly,—"let herself go,"—or trembled with horror and run away as from some evil thing. Being as she was, modern, intellectual, proudly questioning all maxims, she kept this new phenomenon in her hand, saying, "What does it mean for me?" The note of the Intellectuals!
CHAPTER XXVI
There was the soft sound of a footstep on the padded stairs, and Percy
Woodyard glanced into the room.
"Hello, Tom!" he said briskly, and crossed to Conny, whose smooth brow he touched softly with the tips of his fingers. "How goes it, Tom?"
"You are home early," Conny complained in her treble drawl.
"Must go to Albany to-night," Percy explained, a weary note in his voice.
"Not dining out to-night, Tom?"
It was a little joke they had, that when Cairy was not with them he was "dining out."…