“Dicky Cobden hasn’t written a line from the Kong that we can publish. We’ve cabled him to come in, though he’s probably started. You’ll recall that Belgium lies between France and Germany. She’s holding the Germans off from Paris, giving France and England a chance to get set. Belgium’s the world’s public square right now, the one vortexical spot on the face of the earth. Doesn’t it occur to you that even a new angle on her sins in the heart of Africa is about as much in time and place right now, as Paul Revere’s ride?”
... Three weeks later, she heard that Richard Cobden was in town; that John Higgins had seen him the night before. All that day at the office she kept listening for his step and voice, but he didn’t come. His car was in front of the Harrow Street house, however, when she reached there, and a light showed between the doors from his “parlor.” She lost some of the sense of suffocation when she saw that, a curious gladness for a moment. She tapped the door with her finger tip, pulled the curtain aside ever so little and said:
“Hello.”
A quick step in the inner room; then he was before her in the doorway, drawing her in under the light.
“Pidge—Pidge,” he repeated.
The boyish look was gone from him. He might have been taken for ten years older. The thing had happened that takes place abruptly in many Americans, more among business men than artists: Youth had been put away, its trace of divine humor exchanged for adult seriousness.
“Why didn’t you come to the office to-day, Dicky?” she asked.
“I wanted to see you here—like this.”
They were standing under the light.
“Why, you’re different,” she said.