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Pleydon was it at Markue's party or later? talking about "Homer's children" had meant the creations of great artists, in sound or color or words or form, through that supreme love unrealized in other life. The statue of Simon Downige, towering before her against the sky and above the sea, held in immutable bronze his conviction.
Well, I shall be back in a few months, very serious, and a politician a sculptor has to be that if he means to land any public monuments in America. "'I hope to see you." The letter ended abruptly, with the signature, "Pleydon." "Are you happy, Linda?" Arnaud Hallet asked unexpectedly after a short silence. So abruptly interrogated she was unable to respond.
Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and deep in the mystery of his passion she was suddenly invaded by an insistent desire to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke to Arnaud at once about this; and alone, through his delicacy of perception, Linda went to Boston the following day.
In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatever might have been serious in her attitude toward him dissolved by the lightness of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to her deepest feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear in that she knew what troubled her.
She smiled at him with half-closed eyes and the conviction that, with Pleydon, she could easily be different. He leaned forward and his voice startled her with the impression that he had read her mind: "If you could care for any one a lifetime would be short to get you. Look, you have never been out of my thoughts or within my reach. It seems a myth that I kissed you; impossible ... Linda."
Linda tried to speak, to lie; but, miserably still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, the fervor of his longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to his side. An unbearable constraint deepened with the silence in the room, and later he lightly said: "You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age " The only other quantity in her life was Dodge Pleydon.
The men at once entered on another discussion which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that her husband now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to the sculptor. Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatient with minds that disagreed with his. He was at once thinner and bigger, his face deeply lined; but his eyes had a steady vital intensity difficult to encounter.
Three years had vanished since she had gone with an intention of finality to his apartment, and in that time he had neither been in their house nor written. Linda had expected this; she was without the desire to see or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her; as a man, a potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was a piece with her memories, the triumphs of her young days.
Any failure was as much Arnaud Hallet's as hers; he had had his opportunity, all that for which he had implored her. Her thoughts returned to Dodge Pleydon. April was well advanced, and he had written that he'd be back and see them in the spring. Linda listened to her heart but it was unhastened by a beat. She would be very glad to have him at hand, in her life again, of course.
In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas with the new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning of the news. "It seems," he told her, "that a big rumpus has developed in Hesperia over the Pleydon statue the present Downige omnipotence, never friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder. You know what I mean.
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