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It was gloomy, with a promise of snow outside; and the great space of the stairway to the galleries was filled with shadow and the strains of Armide echoing from the orchestra playing at the railing above the entrance. Pleydon, together with a great many others, had spread an overcoat on the masonry of the steps, and they were seated in the obscurity of the balustrade.
This, to her, was widely different from the futile efforts of her mother, those women of the past, to preserve for practical ends their flushes of youth and exhilaration. She felt obscurely that she was serving a deeper reality created by the hands of Pleydon, Arnaud's faith and pure pleasure, all that countless men had seen in her for admiration, solace and power.
Arnaud, drawing life from the vitality of an atmosphere charged with youth, was unflagging in splendid spirits and his valorous wit. Jean would never inspire the affection Arnaud had given her; nor the passion that, in Pleydon, had burned unfed even by hope. Her thoughts slipped away from the present to the sculptor.
Pleydon, seated for over an hour without moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette, followed her with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied passion. Linda heard Vigne's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of heart, following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's room, and she was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of Mrs. Moses Feldt's old merriment.
Directly below was where Pleydon had kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; but only to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the inevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her she hadn't even been surprised.
Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her.
Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. "I must admit," her husband continued, "that I looked for some small display of concern. I give you my word there are moments when I think Pleydon himself cut you out of stone. He isn't great enough for that, though; in the way of perfection you successfully gild the lily. A thing held to be impossible."
There was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her was it toward heaven? and kissed her mouth. She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. "Linda Condon?" he said, in a tone of inquiry. At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a sharp icy pain cut at her heart.
The gesture of his hand, too, had been copied from a brilliant personage with a consuming impatience at all impotence. "Remember me to Arnaud," he said, holding her gloves and the short fur cape. "Wait!" he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase against the wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silk cord and produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile with age.
It was quite late, perhaps eleven o'clock, and the fireflies, slowly rising into the night, had vanished. Linda was cool and remote and grave, silently repeating and weighing the phrases of her letter to Pleydon. She realized that Arnaud Hallet was coming to like her a very great deal; but she gave this only the slightest attention.
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