Logotheti got up now, and when he was on his feet, Margaret was already
close to him. She was pale and her eyes were bright, and when she spoke
he felt the warmth of her breath in his face. He held out his hand
mechanically, but he hardly noticed that she did not take it.
'I want to speak to you alone,' she said.
Madame De Rosa evidently understood that nothing more was expected of
her for the present, and she sat down and made herself comfortable.
'Will you come with me?' Logotheti asked, controlling his voice.
Margaret nodded; he led the way and they left the room together. Just
outside the door there was a small lift. He turned up the electric
light, and Margaret stepped in; then he followed and worked the lift
himself. In the narrow space there was barely room for two; Logotheti
felt a throbbing in his temples and the red spots on his cheek-bones
grew darker. He could hear and almost feel Margaret's slightest
movement as she stood close behind him while he faced the shut door of
the machine. He did not know why she had come, he did not guess why she
wished to be alone with him, but that was what she had asked, and he
was taking her where they would really be alone together; and it was
not his fault. Why had she come?
When a terrible accident happens to a man, the memory of all his life
may pass before his eyes in the interval of a second or two. I once
knew a man who fell from the flying trapeze in a circus in Berlin,
struck on one of the ropes to which the safety net was laced and broke
most of his bones. He told me that he had never before understood the
meaning of eternity, but that ever afterwards, for him, it meant the
time that had passed after he had missed his hold and before he struck
and was unconscious. He could associate nothing else with the word.
Logotheti remembered, as long as he lived, the interminable interval
between Margaret's request to see him alone, and the noiseless closing
of the sound-proof door when they had entered the upper room, where
Aphrodite stood in the midst and the soft light fell from high windows
that were half-shaded.
Even then, though her anger was hot and her thoughts were chasing one
another furiously, Margaret could not repress an exclamation of
surprise when she first saw the statue facing her in its bare beauty,
like a living thing.
Logotheti laid one hand very lightly upon her arm, and was going to say
something, but she sprang back from his touch as if it burnt her. The
colour deepened in his dark cheeks and his eyes seemed brighter and
nearer together. When a woman comes to a man's house and asks to be
alone with him, she need not play horror because the tips of his
fingers rest on her sleeve for a moment. Why did she come?