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Arnaud demanded anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. She replied: "Dodge died this morning." His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. "I'm sorry, Linda," his hand was on her shoulder. "It is a shock to you. A fine man, a genius none stronger in our day. When you were young and for so long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all this while.
But at last she could see that he had preserved her spirit, her secret self, from destruction. He had cheated death of her fineness. The delicate perfection of her youth would never perish, never be dulled by old age or corrupted in death. It had inspired and entered into Pleydon's being, and he had lifted it on the pedestal rising between the sea and sky.
She could say nothing. Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The solid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it. She realized that she would never get from life what supremely repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of practically every vision.
Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source, had had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always been hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid the slightest attention to her.
He was still for a disconcerting length of time, but through which Linda steadily met his interrogation. Then he bent over and seriously removed the man beside her. "Adieu, Louis," he said. The weight of Pleydon's body depressed the entire divan. "An ordinary man," he told her, "would ask how the devil you got here.
Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could have made up for your loss." She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet had ever had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate air with song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in his certainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead.
Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in his narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room.
Pleydon was lounging in a chair beyond her. She couldn't play but she was able, slowly, to pick out the notes of simple and familiar airs echoes of Gluck and blurred motives of Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained; the sounds, however crude and disconnected, brought things back to her. What things, she replied to Pleydon's query, she didn't in the least know; but pleasant.
She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juice from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of her mother. Arnaud was speaking, "I'm afraid this will cut through Pleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique power. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little files and countless finite improvements.
She gazed again, for a last view, at the bronze seated figure; and a word of Pleydon's, but rather it was Greek, wove its significance in the placid texture of her thoughts. Its exact shape evaded her, a difficult word to recall Katharsis, the purging of the heart.
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