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Updated: May 22, 2025
As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in the bright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of Arnaud Hallet's humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told her that Pleydon was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactory she was able to see him at once. To her great pleasure neither Pleydon nor his clothes had changed.
France was summoned against Spain; the architectural degrading of Italy deplored.... It amazed her that any one could remember so much. Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation of her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an added obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning.
Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh, emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When he shut his mouth after a decided statement she could see the projection of the jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of his cheeks.
By her side Elouise Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faint jangle of an old thin piano, the facts of a family connection or a commendation of the Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, and his conversation with Pleydon was strung with terms completely unintelligible to her. It developed, finally, into an argument over the treatment of the acanthus motive in rococo ornament.
Linda thought still further about kissing, with the discovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of the kiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far as possible from the actuality. Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing to the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard Club, if she changed address.
Pleydon said: "I told you that old Simon was unbalanced; now you can see it by his reception in a successful city. The sculptor do you remember him, a Beaux-Arts graduate? admits that he had always opposed it, but that political motives overbore his pure protest. There is a scheme now to build a pavilion, for babies, and shut out the monument from open view.
Linda understood that he was highly intellectual, and frequently contributed historical and genealogical papers to societies and bulletins, but compared with Dodge Pleydon's brilliant personality and reputation, Pleydon surrounded by the Susanna Nodas of life, Arnaud was as dingy as his shoes. She wondered idly when the latter would actually try to love her.
The fever of course; yet that doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truth is, I suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature, like the jealous God of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, but Pleydon reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it's because of the detachment you have in common."
"And if men have fingers like carrots " Susanna mimicked him. Judith, flushed, her hair loosened, approached. "Linda," she demanded, "do you remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or three?" Markue, at her shoulder, begged her not to consider home. "I'm going almost immediately," Pleydon said, "and taking your Linda." His height and determined manner scattered all objections.
Beyond the fence at regular intervals an electric car passed with an increasing and diminishing clangor. The white petals of the magnolia-tree had fallen and been wheeled away; the blossoms of the rhododendron were dead on their stems. It was, Linda felt, a very old garden that had known many momentary emotions and lives. Dodge Pleydon, standing before her, put his hands on her shoulders.
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