“Hasn’t he?”
“Perhaps. Up to now. What will he do when he wakes up to an empty world?”
“Write, won’t he? And then the world won’t be empty.”
“He’ll think it so. That is why I’m sorry for him.”
“Won’t you be sorry a little for me?” pleaded the girl. “Anyway, for the part of me that I’m leaving here? Perhaps it’s the very best of me.”
Miss Van Arsdale shook her head. “Oh, no! A pleasantly vivid dream of changed and restful things. That’s all. Your waking will be only a sentimental and perfumed regret—a sachet-powder sorrow.”
“You’re bitter.”
“I don’t want him hurt,” protested the other. “Why did you come here? What should a girl like you, feverish and sensation-loving and artificial, see in a boy like Ban to charm you?”
“Ah, don’t you understand? It’s just because my world has been too dressed up and painted and powdered that I feel the charm of—of—well, of ease of existence. He’s as easy as an animal. There’s something about him—you must have felt it—sort of impassioned sense of the gladness of life; when he has those accesses he’s like a young god, or a faun. But he doesn’t know his own power. At those times he might do anything.”
She shivered a little and her lids drooped over the luster of her dreaming eyes.