CHAPTER VI
She believed that she could discern in him already the first hints of middle age. His lifeless, brown hair was receding above his temples. His small mustaches, which ought to have made him debonair, seemed on his sallow face like the worthless disguise of a pessimist at the feast of life.
Her look of compassion struck him silent. He smiled in self-contempt, then uttered a sharp sigh, pressed his palm to his forehead, and produced a tiny silver box, from which he took a tablet.
"More antipyrene?" she demanded reproachfully.
"My sinus is pretty bad to-night. This salt air blowing in from the Sound——"
He declared that he was going away again. "His health made it necessary." He had hung round New York long enough, enduring an impossible climate because of an idiotic hope. He uttered the word "Arizona." He spoke of hot deserts, solitudes under the stars, mirages less mocking than his aspirations. As he contemplated her delicately fervent face, her tapering, graceful body, wrapped like something very precious in pale gold, his eyes glittered with tears.
"Dear Cornie——"
And once more she began the familiar rigmarole. Her lips shaped the immemorial complaint, "Why isn't our friendship enough—why must we always be clouding our old congeniality——" And so on. These inexorable words, combined with her look of pity and reproach—a look that seemed almost amorous on her fair face—gave him an impression of immense perfidiousness.
He turned bitter. He asked her where the ideal suitor could be loitering—the strange knight for whom she used to watch as a little girl, the fairytale prince from another kingdom, who was to sweep her off her feet by the force of his perfections, and carry her away.
As he spoke, there stole through the doorway the first notes of Vienna Carnival. In the music room old Brantome had been persuaded to play Schumann.