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"Is he still in France?" he queried. "Pleydon should be a strong man; I am sure we are both conscious of a little disappointment in him." She said: "I'll read you his letter, it's on the table. "'You will see, my dear Linda, that I have not moved from the Rue de Penthievre, although I have given up the place at Etretat, and I am not going to renew the lease here.
The life-size version of his Simon Downige was again under way it had been torn down, Linda knew, more than once and he was in a fever of composition. Nor was this, she decided with Arnaud, his only oppression: the Asiatic fever clung to him with disquieting persistence. Pleydon himself admitted he had a degree or two in the evening.
He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous against the curtained light. "I don't pretend to guess. I'm a creative artist Simon Downige at Cottarsport I have you. If it's God so much the better." What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his possession of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all realities, were veils to Pleydon.
Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, in order to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately. Pleydon helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Linda demanded quantities of air. He was, he told her at the door, leaving in an hour for New York. "I wish you could be happier," she insisted. He reminded her that he had had the afternoon with her.
The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations by his flashes of perceptive intelligence; while she was frankly abashed at the delicate rosy perfection of her daughter. The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him.
A struggle was set up within her: on one hand was everything that she had been, all her experience, all advice, and her innate detachment; on the other an obscure delicious thrill. Perhaps this was what she now wanted. Linda wondered if she could try it just a little, let herself go experimentally. She glanced swiftly at Pleydon, and his bulk, his heavy features, the sullen mouth, appalled her.
It's not important to insist on my sanity." The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; his hurried voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dull reddish patch, she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she told herself that the fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued: "Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old.
"I can't marry you," she said in a flat and dragged voice. He demanded abruptly: "Why not?" "I don't know." She recognized his utter right to the temper that mastered him. For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her. "You feel that way now," he declared; "and perhaps next month; but you will change; in the end I'll have you."
Linda replied honestly that she enjoyed being with them extremely. Her mother's dislike, the heavy luxury of the Feldt apartment, held little attraction for her. Then, too, losing the sense of the bareness of the house Hallet Lowrie had built for his French wife, she began to find it surprisingly appealing. Her mind returned to her promise to Pleydon.
A limp hat was in his hand, and, beneath a brow to which the hair was plastered by sweat, his eyes gazed fixed and aspiring into a hidden dream perfectly created by his desire. Here, she realized at last, she had a glimmer of the beauty, the creative force, that animated Dodge Pleydon.