As she spoke a sudden pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house, always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the superficial lotus-charm of Southern life—and he had lived it superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before him. It caught away his breath and choked sudden tears into his eyes. Came and went like a flash—for before she had done speaking a sudden new bond of sympathy put away the stranger forevermore, and he was no longer alone.
'Then you are Southern born too,' he said, with a quick step forward, and involuntarily outstretched hand. Hers dropped into it.
'Yes, I am hardly acclimated yet. I shiver under these pale Northern skies from August till June. O my Louisiana, you never made 'life a burden' with such dark, chill days, and sobbing, cruel winds!' She turned to the windows. A sudden uncontrollable quaver of impatience and longing ran through her speech and hurried the words with unusual vehemence.
'I thought you must have liked the day, since you robed yourself in its haze and mist.' He laid his hand lightly on her gray drapery with reverent touch.
'And I thought my carnations would redeem that. Since they didn't—'and she tossed the whole bright, spicy handful on the table.
In a vase on the mantle, gray, passionate, odorous blooms were massed loosely about a cluster of fragile, intense day lilies, and a dash of purple and crimson trailed with the fuchsias over its edge, and gleamed up from the white marble ledge. He went to the vase, shook out the fuchsias, and laid the residue in her lap.
'Heliotrope, finally,' he said.
She brushed it lightly away with a half shudder.
'Not that. I don't like heliotrope. Its perfume is heart-breaking, hopeless. It belongs in coffins, about still, dead faces. If it had a voice, we should hear continual moans. It would be no worse than this, though.'
'You will wear the lilies then, unless the heliotrope scent clings to them too,' he said, gathering up the obnoxious flowers.