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No one else living had understood Pleydon; and when descriptions of his life spoke of the austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda thought of the brittle glove in the gilt-lacquer box. Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all the unintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma.
She was stopped, fortunately, by the perception that, amazingly, the statue was more actual than Dodge Pleydon. It touched the center of her life more nearly. Why, she didn't know. If her mental confusion increased by as much as a feeling, Linda thought, she would be close to madness. It was unbearable at practically forty.
Men usually filled her with an unaccountable shrinking into her remotest self. Pleydon was different; her liking for him had destroyed a large part of her reserve; but a surety of instinct told her that she couldn't experiment there. It was characteristic that a lesser challenge left her cold. She had better marry as she had planned.
That single momentary delicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted. Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity? What did Pleydon mean by spirit?
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 explained this haltingly to Pleydon, who listened with a flattering interest. "I expect you're laughing at me inside," she ended impotently. "And the other, the Greek Victory," he added, "is the goddess of the other world, of the spirit. It's quaint a heathen woman should be that." Linda discovered that she liked Pleydon enormously.
Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise in place of the motor she had expected a small graceful single-horse victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night of Fifth Avenue.
Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost in the foundry casting his statue for six months. Arnaud went over to view the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm. "Its simplicity is the surprising part," he told her. "The barest statement possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition; I can't decide if it is mental or physical.
The informal flannels and soft collar, too, suited the largeness of his being and gestures. There was a murmur of meeting, Susanna Noda smiled appealingly; and then, as Pleydon found a place on a divan, she at once contentedly sat on his lap.
If she had been a very intelligent woman, and, of course, not quite bad-looking, she might have understood both Pleydon and Arnaud, the latter a man whose mind was practically absorbed in the pages of books. There could be no doubt, no question, of their love for her. Then there had always been the others the men at the parties, in her garden, through the old days of her childhood in hotels.
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