All else seemed to her like a moving and subdued
background,—an endless series of grey scenes vaguely painted through which figures came and went, some shadowy and colourless as phantoms, some soberly outlined, some delicately tinted—but all more or less subordinate, more or less monochromatic, unimportant except for balance and composition, as painters use indefinite shapes and shades so that the eyes may more perfectly concentrate on the centre of their inspiration.
And the centre of all, for her, was Clive. Since her mother's death there had been no other point of view for her, no other focus for the forces of her mind, no other real desire, no other content. He had entered her child's life and had become, instantly, all that the child-world held for her. And it was so through the years of her girlhood. Absent, or during his brief reappearances, the central focus of her heart and mind was Clive. And, in womanhood, all forces in her mind and spirit and, now, of body, centred in this man who stood out against the faded tapestry of the world all alone for her, the only living thing on earth with which her heart had mated as a child, and in which now her mind and spirit had found Nirvana.
All men, all women, seemed to have their shadowy being only to make this man more real to her.
Friends came, remained, and went,—Cecil Reeve, gay, charmed with everything, and, as always, mischievously ready to pay court to her; Francis Hargrave, politely surprised but full of courteous admiration for her good taste; John Lyndhurst, Grismer, Harry Ferris, Young Welter, Arthur Ensart, and James Allys,—all were bidden for the day; all came,
marvelled in the several manners characteristic of them, and finally went their various ways, serving only, as always, to make clearer to her the fadeless memory of an absent man. For, to her, the merest thought of him was more real, more warm and vivid, than all of these, even while their eager eyes sought hers and their voices were sounding in her ears.
Nina Grey came with Anne Randolph for a week-end; and then came Jeanne Delauny, and Adele Millis. The memory of their visits lingered with Athalie as long, perhaps, as the scent of roses hangs in a dim, still room before the windows are open in the morning to the outer air.
The first of August a cicada droned from the hill-top woods and all her garden became saturated with the homely and bewitching odour of old-fashioned rockets.
On the grey wall nasturtiums blazed; long stretches of brilliant portulaca edged the herbaceous borders; clusters of auratum lilies hung in the transparent shadow of Cydonia and Spirea; and the first great dahlias faced her in maroon splendour from the spiked thickets along the wall.
Once or twice she went to town on shopping bent, and on one of these occasions impulse took her to the apartment furnished for her so long ago by Clive.