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. After dinner, out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched the flicker of the cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vague that for a long while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keen rushing sensation of the strangeness of her situation here—Linda Hallet. The night was like a dream from which she would stir, sigh, to find herself back again in the past waiting for the return of her mother from one of her late parties.

But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, went into the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice began in a low remembering tone:

“What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smothered room where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold of Hallet in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand what happened; why, all the time, you were upset—why, why, why?”

“In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some of my mother's front wave,” she explained.

“Of course,” he replied derisively, “nothing could be plainer.”

She agreed calmly. “It was very plain. If you want me to try to tell you don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing it because I was so rotten to you.

“Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred other things exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, did nothing but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think it was a game they played and wonder where the fun was. There were even hints about that and later they particularized and it made me as sick as possible. The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald; and after a while, when they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die.

“That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other—men away from their families for what they called a good time and women plotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them. Then mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt, and I met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told me worse things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of that, I met you and you kissed me.

“But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it brought back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love you, and have you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in the world. I was sure, if you would only be patient, that I could change what had hurt me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tell you because I didn't understand myself.” She stopped, and Pleydon repeated, bitterly and slow:

“Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisite hope.” She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward, his face masked in darkness. “Perhaps you think I haven't paid.

“You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow to make you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endure your hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched the earth. Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in a thousand, not one in a million, has such an experience. If they did it would tear the world into shreds. It would tear them as it has me. I realize the other, the common thing—who experimented more! This has nothing to do with it. A boy lost in the idealism of his first worship has a faint reflection. Listen:

“I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. You yourself—the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ... but without a sound.

“This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full of people or the Place VendÔme; and it, you, is all I care for, all I think about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there for hours, with you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blind man, a dead man warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:

“I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothing and made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together in a new world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walk through dark trees—God knows why—like pines. And every time I think of you it is exactly as though I could never die, as though you had burned all the corruption out of me and I was made of silver fire. And listen:

“Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are now and the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words, and I forget them the moment they have gone, the second they are still. But I haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I work in clay or stone I model and cut you into every surface and fold. I see you looking back at me out of marble and bronze. And here, in this garden, you tried to give me more—”

The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of his voice. There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and the light that had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's window was suddenly extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and a confused dejection, the weight of an insuperable disappointment. She could say nothing. Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The solid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it.

She realized that she would never get from life what supremely repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for Dodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense of the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were Lowrie and VignÉ; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed no more than shadows or colored mist. This terrified her—what a hopelessly deficient woman she must be! But even in the profundity of her depression the old vibration of nameless joy reached her heart.