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In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feeling for her to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam in his eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely not normal. Pleydon, his love, terrified her. "No," she said with an assumed hurried lightness, "don't try to explain. I must manage to survive the injury to my vanity."
She was sorry for herself, yes, and for Dodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense of the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were Lowrie and Vigne; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed no more than shadows or colored mist.
She watched him as he poured the sherry from a decanter with a silver label hung on a chain with a feeling of mild approbation. On the whole he was nice but uninteresting. What a different man from Pleydon! The days passed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Hallet constantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughts continually returned to the sculptor.
He came over to see them more frequently now, through what he called the great moment so tiresomely extended of his life. Pleydon came oftener but he said infinitely less. It was his custom to arrive for dinner and suddenly depart early or late in the evening.
He wrote her again, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; but his letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that she had to ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added: "That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed enormously curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as myself. It's clear that he has dropped his women.
His old easy formality returned as he made his departure. In reply to Pleydon's demand she told him listlessly that she would be here for, perhaps, a week longer. Then he'd see her, he continued, in New York, at the Feldts'. In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was still young; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling, be older.
To be happy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; this was necessary to his complete management, the securing of the greatest possible amount of new clothes. It was as far as love should be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with a complete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial and delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon.
But it was she all the while they were approving, discussing, writing about, Linda Condon. She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda Hallet in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like nonsense; but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be explained, for example, to the man who had every right, every evidence, to consider himself her husband.
A great many things that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemed to her probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Linda began to think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren't sufficiently important. Dodge Pleydon. She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up.
It was not new, it extended even to times before Pleydon had entered her life the difficulties presented by the term "love." In her mind it was divided into two or three widely different aspects, phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, in the beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance.
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