"What do you suppose she's like?" he asked inaudibly of the correct vision in the glass.
He had exhausted all the possibilities—a fat, pretentious medium whom Annette's mind transformed by the alchemy of old affection into a presentable personage; a masculine and severe old woman with the "spook" look in her eyes; a fluttering, affected precieuse, concealing her quackery by chatter. Gradually as he thought on her, the second of these hypotheses came to govern—he saw her as the severe and masculine type. This being so, what tack should she take?
The correct vision in the glass vouchsafed no answer to this. His mood persisted as his taxicab whirled him into the region which borders the western edge of Central Park. The thing assumed the proportions of a great adventure. No old preparation for battle, no old packings to break into the unknown dark, had ever given him quite such a sense of the high, free airs where romance blows. He was going on a mere conventional call; but he was going also to high and thrilling possibilities.
The house was like a thousand other houses of the prosperous middle class, distinguishable only by minor differences of doors and steps and area rails, from twenty others on the same block. He found himself making mystery even of this. Separate houses in New York require incomes.
"Evidently it pays to deal in spooks," he said to himself.
His first glimpse of the interior, his subsequent study of the drawing-room while the maid carried in his name, made more vivid this impression. The taste of the whole thing was evident; but the apartment had besides a special flavor. He searched for the elements which gave that impression. It was not the old walnut furniture, ample, huge, upholstered in a wine-colored velours which had faded just enough to take off the curse; it was not the three or four passable old paintings. The real cause came first to him upon the contemplation of a wonderful Buddhist priest-robe which adorned the wall just where the drawing-room met the curtains of the little rear alcove-library. The difference lay in the ornaments—Oriental, mostly East Indian and, all his experience told him, got by intimate association with the Orientals. That robe, that hanging lantern, those chased swords, that gem of a carved Buddha—they came not from the seaports nor from the shops for tourists. Whoever collected them knew the East and its peoples by intimate living. They appeared like presents, not purchases—unless they were loot.
And now—his thumping heart flashed the signal—the delicate feminine flutter that meant Annette, was sounding in the hall. And now at the entrance stood Annette in a white dress, her neck showing a faint rim of tan above her girlish decolletage; Annette smiling rather formally as though this conventional passage after their unconventional meeting and acquaintance sat in embarrassment on her spirits; Annette saying in that vibrant boyish contralto which came always as a surprise out of her exquisite whiteness:
"How do you do, Dr. Blake—you are back in the city rather earlier than you expected, aren't you?"
He was conscious of shock, emotional and professional—emotional that they had not taken up their relation exactly where they left it off—professional because of her appearance. Not only was she pale and just a little drawn of facial line, but that indefinable look of one "called" was on her again.
All this he gathered as he made voluble explanation—the attendance at the sanitorium had fallen off with the approach of autumn—they really needed no assistant to the resident physician—he thought it best to hurry his search for an opening in New York before the winter should set in. Then, put at his ease by his own volubility, and remembering that it is a lover's policy to hold the advantage gained at the last battle, he added: