第40章

"What?" she succeeded in saying.

"Gladys and Scarborough," replied Dumont."She ought to marry--she's got no place to go.And it'd be good business for her--and for him, too, for that matter, if she could land him.

Don't you think she's attractive to men?""Very," said Pauline, lifelessly.

"Don't you think it would be a good match?" he went on.

"Very," she said, looking round wildly, as her breath came more and more quickly.

Langdon strolled up.

"Am I interrupting a family council?" he asked.

"Oh, no," Dumont replied, rising."Take my chair." And he was gone.

"This room is too warm," said Pauline."No, don't open the window.Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window behind her.It was a moonless, winter night--stars thronging the blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in the southern horizon.

When she had been walking there for a quarter of an hour the door-window opened and Langdon looked out."Oh--there you are!" he said.

"Won't you join me?" Her tone assured him that he would not be intruding.He got a hat and overcoat and they walked up and down together.

"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while."They make me appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity, and that I'm----there's nothing little enough to express the human atom where the earth's only a grain.And then they go on to taunt me with how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me--for ever.A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the heel of the Great Executioner.""Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline."But again--often, as a child--and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've gone where I could see them.And they seemed to draw all the fever and the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of--not happiness, not even content, but--courage."They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he studying her face.It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so beautiful.She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her hair high above her forehead.She looked like a splendid plume dropped from the starry wing of night.

"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their family.And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the earthworms."Her face changed."Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he had never seen or suspected in her before.She drew a long breath, closed her eyes and opened them very wide.

"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what `to live' means.""Then why don't you?" he asked--he liked to catch people in their confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts, not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.

"Because I'm a daughter--that's anchor number one.Because I'm a mother--that's anchor number two.Because I'm a wife--that's anchor number three.And anchor number four--because I'm under the spell of inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in them.Tied, hands and feet!""Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly."That's the skeleton at life's banquet.It takes away my appetite."She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery.

"It frightens ME away from the table."