“Perfectly good Moonstone, my dear. Like the readymade clothes that hang in the windows, made to fit everybody and fit nobody, a phrase that can be used on all occasions. Oh,”—he started across the room again,—“that’s one of the fine things about your going! You’ll be with the right sort of people and you’ll learn a good, live, warm German, that will be like yourself. You’ll get a new speech full of shades and color like your voice; alive, like your mind. It will be almost like being born again, Thea.”
She was not offended. Fred had said such things to her before, and she wanted to learn. In the natural course of things she would never have loved a man from whom she could not learn a great deal.
“Harsanyi said once,” she remarked thoughtfully, “that if one became an artist one had to be born again, and that one owed nothing to anybody.”
“Exactly. And when I see you again I shall not see you, but your daughter. May I?” He held up his cigarette case questioningly and then began to smoke, taking up again the song which ran in his head:—
“Deutlich schimmert auf jedem, Purpurblättchen, Adelaide!”
“I have half an hour with you yet, and then, exit Fred.” He walked about the room, smoking and singing the words under his breath. “You’ll like the voyage,” he said abruptly. “That first approach to a foreign shore, stealing up on it and finding it—there’s nothing like it. It wakes up everything that’s asleep in you. You won’t mind my writing to some people in Berlin? They’ll be nice to you.”
“I wish you would.” Thea gave a deep sigh. “I wish one could look ahead and see what is coming to one.”
“Oh, no!” Fred was smoking nervously; “that would never do. It’s the uncertainty that makes one try. You’ve never had any sort of chance, and now I fancy you’ll make it up to yourself. You’ll find the way to let yourself out in one long flight.”
Thea put her hand on her heart. “And then drop like the rocks we used to throw—anywhere.” She left the chair and went over to the sofa, hunting for something in the trunk trays. When she came back she found Fred sitting in her place. “Here are some handkerchiefs of yours. I’ve kept one or two. They’re larger than mine and useful if one has a headache.”
“Thank you. How nicely they smell of your things!” He looked at the white squares for a moment and then put them in his pocket. He kept the low chair, and as she stood beside him he took her hands and sat looking intently at them, as if he were examining them for some special purpose, tracing the long round fingers with the tips of his own. “Ordinarily, you know, there are reefs that a man catches to and keeps his nose above water. But this is a case by itself. There seems to be no limit as to how much I can be in love with you. I keep going.” He did not lift his eyes from her fingers, which he continued to study with the same fervor. “Every kind of stringed instrument there is plays in your hands, Thea,” he whispered, pressing them to his face.