“Why, you know how much we love to have you, Ted,” says Elinor and Ted feels himself turn hot and cold as he was certain you never really did except in diseases. But then she adds, “You and Ollie and Bob Templar, and, oh, all Peter's friends.”
He looks at her steadily for a long moment—the blue silks of her costume suit her completely. She is there, black hair and clear eyes, small hands and mouth pure as the body of a dream and elvish with thoughts like a pansy—all the body of her, all that people call her. And she is so delicately removed from him—so clean in all things where he is not—that he knows savagely within him that there can be no real justice in a world where he can even touch her lightly, and yet he must touch her because if he does not he will die. All the things he meant to say shake from him like scraps of confetti, he does not worry any more about money or seeming ridiculous or being worthy, all he knows at all in the world is his absolute need of her, a need complete as a child's and so choosing any words that come.
“Listen—do you like me?” says the particolored harlequin and all the sharp leaves of the hedge begin to titter as wind runs over them at one of the oldest and least sensible questions in the world.
The young Chinese lady turns toward the harlequin. There is some laughter in her voice and a great deal of surprise.
“Why, Ted, of course—why, why shouldn't I?—You're Peter's friend and—”
“Oh, I don't mean that!” The harlequin's hands twist at each other till the knuckles hurt, but he seems to have recovered most voluble if chaotic powers of speech.
“That was silly, asking that—but it's hard—when you care for anybody so much you can't see—when you love them till they're the only thing there is you care about—and you know you're not fit to touch them—not worthy of them—that they're thousands of times too good for you but—oh, Elinor, Elinor, I just can't stand it any more! Do you love me, Elinor, because I love you as I never loved anything else in the world?”
The young Chinese lady doesn't seem to be quite certain of just what is happening. She has started to speak three times and stopped each time while the harlequin has been waiting with the suspense of a man hanging from Heaven on a pack-thread. But then she does speak.
“I think I do, Ted—-oh, Ted, I know I do,” she says uncertainly—and then Oliver, if he were there, would have stepped forward to bow like an elegant jack-knife at the applause most righteously due him for perfect staging, for he really could not have managed better about the kiss that follows if he had spent days and days showing the principals how to rehearse it.
And then something happens that is as sudden as a bubble's going to pieces and most completely out of keeping with any of Oliver's ideas on how love should be set for the theatre. For “Oh, what am I doing?” says the harlequin in the voice of a man who has met his airy double alone in a wood full of ghosts and seen his own death in its face, and he crumples into a loose bag of parti-colored silks, his head in his hands. [Illustration: The Young Chinese Lady is Shrinking Inside Her Silks] It would be nothing very much to any sensible person, no doubt—the picture that made itself out of cold dishonorable fog in the instant of peace after their double release from pain. It was only the way that Elinor looked at him after the kiss—and remembering the last time he saw his own diminished little image in the open eyes of a girl.