第24章

The young woman was undoubtedly as silly as ever; yet after watching her for a few minutes Miss Summers perceived that she had somehow grown luminous, perilous, obscurely menacing to nice girls and the young men they intended eventually to accept.Suddenly, at the sight, a rage of possessorship awoke in her.She must save Darrow, assert her right to him at any price.Pride and reticence went down in a hurricane of jealousy.She heard him laugh, and there was something new in his laugh...She watched him talking, talking...He sat slightly sideways, a faint smile beneath his lids, lowering his voice as he lowered it when he talked to her.She caught the same inflections, but his eyes were different.

It would have offended her once if he had looked at her like that.Now her one thought was that none but she had a right to be so looked at.And that girl of all others! What illusions could he have about a girl who, hardly a year ago, had made a fool of herself over the fat young man stolidly eating terrapin across the table? If that was where romance and passion ended, it was better to take to district visiting or algebra!

All night she lay awake and wondered: "What was she saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things?" and she decided that her heart would tell her--that the next time they were alone together the irresistible word would spring to her lips.He came the next day, and they were alone, and all she found was: "I didn't know that you and Kitty Mayne were such friends."He answered with indifference that he didn't know it either, and in the reaction of relief she declared: "She's certainly ever so much prettier than she was...""She's rather good fun," he admitted, as though he had not noticed her other advantages; and suddenly Anna saw in his eyes the look she had seen there the previous evening.

She felt as if he were leagues and leagues away from her.

All her hopes dissolved, and she was conscious of sitting rigidly, with high head and straight lips, while the irresistible word fled with a last wing-beat into the golden mist of her illusions...

She was still quivering with the pain and bewilderment of this adventure when Fraser Leath appeared.She met him first in Italy, where she was travelling with her parents;and the following winter he came to New York.In Italy he had seemed interesting: in New York he became remarkable.

He seldom spoke of his life in Europe, and let drop but the most incidental allusions to the friends, the tastes, the pursuits which filled his cosmopolitan days; but in the atmosphere of West Fifty-fifth Street he seemed the embodiment of a storied past.He presented Miss Summers with a prettily-bound anthology of the old French poets and, when she showed a discriminating pleasure in the gift, observed with his grave smile: "I didn't suppose I should find any one here who would feel about these things as Ido." On another occasion he asked her acceptance of a half-effaced eighteenth century pastel which he had surprisingly picked up in a New York auction-room."I know no one but you who would really appreciate it," he explained.

He permitted himself no other comments, but these conveyed with sufficient directness that he thought her worthy of a different setting.That she should be so regarded by a man living in an atmosphere of art and beauty, and esteeming them the vital elements of life, made her feel for the first time that she was understood.Here was some one whose scale of values was the same as hers, and who thought her opinion worth hearing on the very matters which they both considered of supreme importance.The discovery restored her self-confidence, and she revealed herself to Mr.Leath as she had never known how to reveal herself to Darrow.

As the courtship progressed, and they grew more confidential, her suitor surprised and delighted her by little explosions of revolutionary sentiment.He said:

"Shall you mind, I wonder, if I tell you that you live in a dread-fully conventional atmosphere?" and, seeing that she manifestly did not mind: "Of course I shall say things now and then that will horrify your dear delightful parents--Ishall shock them awfully, I warn you."

In confirmation of this warning he permitted himself an occasional playful fling at the regular church-going of Mr.

and Mrs.Summers, at the innocuous character of the literature in their library, and at their guileless appreciations in art.He even ventured to banter Mrs.

Summers on her refusal to receive the irrepressible Kitty Mayne who, after a rapid passage with George Darrow, was now involved in another and more flagrant adventure.

"In Europe, you know, the husband is regarded as the only judge in such matters.As long as he accepts the situation --" Mr.Leath explained to Anna, who took his view the more emphatically in order to convince herself that, personally, she had none but the most tolerant sentiments toward the lady.

The subversiveness of Mr.Leath's opinions was enhanced by the distinction of his appearance and the reserve of his manners.He was like the anarchist with a gardenia in his buttonhole who figures in the higher melodrama.Every word, every allusion, every note of his agreeably-modulated voice, gave Anna a glimpse of a society at once freer and finer, which observed the traditional forms but had discarded the underlying prejudices; whereas the world she knew had discarded many of the forms and kept almost all the prejudices.