The only other quantity in her life was Dodge Pleydon. He wrote her again, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; but his letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that she had to ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added:

“That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed enormously—curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as myself. It's clear that he has dropped his women. I saw a photograph of the Cotton Mather reproduced in a weekly, and it was as gaunt as a Puritan Sunday. Brimmed with power. Why don't we see him oftener? Write and say I'd like to contradict him again about the Eastlake period.”

He made no further reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed to write as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at the possibility of a continuation of his admissions of love she was weary of the thought of its uselessness. Linda was, she told herself, damned by practicability. Her husband used the familiar term of reproach, material. She didn't in the least want to be. Circumstance, she had a feeling, had forced it upon her.

Arnaud, however, who had met Dodge Pleydon in Philadelphia, brought him home. Linda saw with a strange constriction of the heart that Pleydon's hair was definitely gray. He had had a recurrence of the fever contracted in Soochow. The men at once entered on another discussion which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that her husband now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to the sculptor. Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatient with minds that disagreed with his. He was at once thinner and bigger, his face deeply lined; but his eyes had a steady vital intensity difficult to encounter.

She considered him in detail as the talk left dinner, the glasses and candles spent. He drank, from a tall tumbler with a single piece of ice, the special whisky Arnaud kept. He had been neglecting himself, too—there were traces of clay about his finger-nails, and he ate hurriedly and insufficiently. When she had an opportunity, Linda decided, she would speak to him about these necessary trifles. Then, she had no chance; and it was not until the following winter, at a Thursday afternoon concert during the yearly exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, that she could gently complain.

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.

“You look as though you hadn't had enough to eat,” she observed. “You used to be almost thick but now you are a thing of terrifying grimness. You look like a monk. I wonder why you're like a monk, Dodge?”

“Linda Condon,” he replied.

“That can't be it now; I haven't been Linda Condon for years, but Mrs. Arnaud Hallet. It's very pretty, of course, and I'd like to think you could keep a young love alive so long. Experience makes me doubt anything of the sort; but then I was always skeptical.”

“You have never been anyone else,” he asserted positively. “You were born Linda Condon and you'll die that, except for some extraordinary accident. I can't imagine what it would be—a miracle like quaker-ladies in the Antarctic.”

“It sounds uncomplimentary, and I'm sick of being compared with polar places. What are quaker-ladies?”

“Fragile little flowers in the spring meadows.”

“I'd rather listen to the music than you.”

“That is why loving you is so eternal, why it doesn't fluctuate like a human emotion. You can't exhaust it and rest before a new tide sweeps back; the timeless ecstasy of a worship of God ... breeding madness.”

She failed to understand and turned a troubled gaze to his bitter repression. “I don't like to make you unhappy, Dodge,” she said in a low tone. “What can I do? I am a horrid disappointment to all of you, but most to myself. I can't go over it again.”

“Beauty has nothing to do with happiness,” he declared harshly. He rose, without consulting her wishes; and Linda followed him as he proceeded above, irresistibly drawn to the bronze he was showing in the Rotunda.

It was the head and part of the shoulders of a very old woman, infinitely worn, starved by want and spent in brutal labor. There was a thin wisp of hair pinned in a meager knot on her skull; her bones were mercilessly indicated, barely covered with drum-like skin; her mouth was stamped with timid humility; while her eyes peered weakly from their sunken depths.

“Well?” he demanded, interrogating her in the interest of his work.

“I—I suppose it's perfectly done,” she replied, at a loss for a satisfactory appreciation. “It's true, certainly. But isn't it more unpleasant than necessary?” Pleydon smiled patiently. “Beauty,” he said, with his mobile gesture. “Pity, Katharsis—the wringing out of all dross.”

The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She was like a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. “Come over here.” He unceremoniously led her to the modeling of a ruffled grouse, faithful in every diversified feather. Linda thought it admirable, really amazing; but he dismissed it with a passionate energy. “The dull figuriste!” he exclaimed. “Daguerre. Once I could have done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness and insolence—before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then to understand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The head you thought unpleasant—haven't you seen her going home in the March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of wet stone floors and steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?”

“No, Dodge, I didn't. They always make me wretched.”

“Well, to realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in an iron winter dark—to experience that in your spirit and put it into durable metal, hard stone—is to hold beauty in your hands.”

Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, in order to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately. Pleydon helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Linda demanded quantities of air. He was, he told her at the door, leaving in an hour for New York. “I wish you could be happier,” she insisted. He reminded her that he had had the afternoon with her. It was so little, she thought, carried rapidly over a smooth wide street. His love for her increased rather than lessened. How wonderful it was.... The woman outside that barred door of treasure.