IT was in the days when nothing physical tainted her passionate attachment to Clive. When she was with him she enjoyed the moment with all her heart and soul—gave to it and to him everything that was best in her—all the richness of her mental and bodily vigour, all the unspoiled enthusiasm of her years, all the sturdy freshness of youth, eager, receptive, credulous, unsatiated.
With them, once more, the old happy companionship began; the Café Arabesque, the Regina, the theatres, the suburban restaurants knew them again. Familiar faces among the waiters welcomed them to the same tables; the same ushers guided them through familiar aisles; the same taxi drivers touched their caps with the same alacrity; the same porters bestirred themselves for tips.
Sometimes when they were not alone, they and their friends danced late at Castle House or the Sans-Souci, or the Humming-Bird, or some such resort, at that time in vogue.
Sometimes on Saturday afternoons or on Sundays and holidays they spent hours in the museums and libraries—not that Clive had either inherited or been educated to any truer appreciation of things worth
while than the average New York man—but like the majority he admitted the solemnity and fearsomeness of art and letters, and his attitude toward them was as carefully respectful as it was in church.
Which first perplexed and then amused Athalie who, with no opportunities, had been born with a wholesome passion for all things beautiful of the mind.
The little she knew she had learned from books or from her companionship with Captain Dane that first summer after Clive had gone abroad. And there was nothing orthodox, nothing pedantic, nothing simulated or artificial in her likes or dislikes, her preferences or her indifference.
Yet, somehow, even without knowing, the girl instinctively gravitated toward all things good.
In modern art—with the exception of a few painters—she found little to attract her; but the magnificence of the great Venetians, the sombre splendour of the great Spaniards, the nobility of the great English and Dutch masters held her with a spell forever new. And, as for the exquisite, naïvely self-conscious works of Greuze, Lancret, Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau, and Nattier, she adored them with all the fresh and natural appetite of a capacity for visual pleasure unjaded.
He recognised Raphael with respect and pleasure when authority reassured him it was Raphael. Also he probably knew more about the history of art than did she. Otherwise it was Athalie who led, instinctively, toward what gallery and library held as their best.