“Do you like Dr. André?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes, well enough why?”
“Because I think he admires Phœbe!”
“Does he?” was the indifferent reply.
“She is probably with him now—or at her lawyer’s.”
Egidia spoke tentatively, as if she were consulting him as to her own line in countenancing the intimacy between the two. Perhaps a desire to ascertain Rivers’ own personal feelings on the subject of the little flirtation unconsciously influenced her.
“There is no harm in André,” said Rivers decidedly. “And, poor little thing, it does her good to be taken out of herself!”
“Nothing ever really does that!” Egidia rejoined. Inwardly she said, “Oh, no, he can’t care for her.” And her face, unconsciously to herself, took on a joyous expression. She went on, with a manner of detached criticism:
“I never, in all my literary life, met any one who lived in herself so completely. Keats speaks of a woman who would have liked to have been engaged to a poem and married to a novel, but Phœbe goes one better, she is her own poem, her own novel. No spectacle, no literature in the world interests her as much. She is always pulling herself up by the roots, as it were, to account for her moral—or immoral—growth, and telling one all about it.”
“And does it bore you?” asked he.