The faint ringing of the bell from outside that probably announced Arnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio, and at once a discussion began between the two men of the difference in the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to the pictorial sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, and Linda declared, “Dodge, you have never made a head of me. How very unflattering!”

“You're an affair for a painter,” he replied; “Goya or Alfred Stevens. No one but Goya could have found a white for you, with the quality of flower petals; and Stevens would have fixed you in an immortality of delicate color, surrounded by your Philadelphia garden.” He stood quite close to her, with his jacket dragged forward by hands thrust into its pockets, and he added at the end of a somber interrogation, “But if you would really like to know why—”

In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feeling for her—to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam in his eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely not normal. Pleydon, his love, terrified her. “No,” she said with an assumed hurried lightness, “don't try to explain. I must manage to survive the injury to my vanity.”

They left New York almost immediately, Pleydon suddenly determining to go with them; and later were scattered through the Hallet household. VignÉ and her husband were temporarily living there; with their heads close together they were making endless computations, numerous floor plans and elevations. Linda, at the piano in the drawing-room, could hear them through the hall. Pleydon was lounging in a chair beyond her. She couldn't play but she was able, slowly, to pick out the notes of simple and familiar airs—echoes of Gluck and blurred motives of Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained; the sounds, however crude and disconnected, brought things back to her. What things, she replied to Pleydon's query, she didn't in the least know; but pleasant.

The fact that she understood so little depressed her with increasing frequency. It was well enough to be ignorant as a girl, or even as a young woman newly married; but she had left all that behind; she had lost her youth without any compensating gain of knowledge. Linda could not assure herself that life was clearer than it had been to her serious childhood. It had always been easily measured on the surface; she had had a very complete grasp of its material aspects almost at once, accomplishing exactly what she had planned. Perhaps this was all; and her trouble an evidence of weakness—the indecision, she saw with contempt, that kept so many people in a constant agitation of disappointment.

Perhaps this was enough; more than the majority had or accomplished. She made, again, a resolute effort to be contented, at rest. Her straying fingers clumsily wrought a fragmentary refrain that mocked her determination. It wasn't new, this—this dissatisfaction; but it had grown sharper. As she was older her restlessness increased at the realization that life, opportunity, were slipping from her. Soon she would be forty.

The conviction seized her that most lives reflected hers in that their questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were the incurious and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She said aloud, “The ones who never heard music.” Pleydon was without a sign that she had spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile, and enormously difficult to perceive. They were like plants in stony ground. Where had she heard that—out of the Bible? Then she thought of her failure to get anything from religion—a part of her inability to drink at the springs which others declared so refreshing. Linda pressed her hands more sharply on the keys and the answering discord had the effect of waking her to reality.

Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost—in the foundry casting his statue—for six months. Arnaud went over to view the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm. “Its simplicity is the surprising part,” he told her. “The barest statement possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition; I can't decide if it is mental or physical. The fever of course; yet that doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truth is, I suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature, like the jealous God of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, but Pleydon reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it's because of the detachment you have in common.” He veered to a detail of Lowrie's first year at a university, and exhibited, against a decent endeavor to the contrary, his boundless pride in their son.

The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable and able. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almost stuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitive perceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhaps because of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate with her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and unsympathetic critic of humanity.

Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the law his fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purely intellectual, reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her own coldness; and, turned on herself, she viewed it with an arbitrary feminine resentment. He was actually courteous to her; but under all their intercourse there was a perceptible impatience. His scorn of other women, girls, however, was openly expressed and honest; it had no trace of the mere affectation of pessimism natural to his age. Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was vastly entertained by this, and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies and contradictions.

Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success be worth—placed, that was, against VignÉ's radiant happiness, Bailey Sandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening?

Her thoughts came back to Pleydon—she had before her a New York paper describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige at Hesperia. There was a long learned article praising its beauty and emphasizing Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly in an age of momentary experimental talents—a humanized Greek force. He didn't belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave her an uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm points of contact. She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda had the sensation of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling mist. A strange position in view of her undeniable common sense, the solid foundations of her temperament and experience. She saw from the paper, further, that the Downige who had commissioned the monument was dead.