Always, now, while she posed, she was looking at him with a still
intentness, as though he really wore a mask and she, breathlessly
vigilant, watched for the moment when he might forget and lift it.
But during the weeks that followed, if the mask were indeed only the
steady preoccupation that his visage wore, she seemed to learn
nothing more about him when his features lost their dark absorption
and he caught her eye and smiled. No, the smile revealed nothing
except another mask under the more serious cast of
concentration--only another disguise that covered whatever this man
might truly be deeper down--this masculine and unknown invader of
frontiers surrendered ere she had understood they were even
besieged.
And during these weeks in early spring their characteristics, even
characters, seemed to have shifted curiously and become reversed;
his was now the light, irresponsible, half-mocking badinage--almost
boyishly boisterous at times, as, for instance, when he stepped
forward after the pose and swung her laughingly from the
model-platform to her corner on the sofa.
"You pretty and clever little thing," he said, "why are you becoming
so serious and absent-minded?"
"Am I becoming so?"
"You are. You oughtn't to: you've made a new and completely
different man of me."
As though that were an admirable achievement, or even of any
particular importance. And yet she seemed to think it was both of
these when, resting against him, within the circle of his arm, still
shy and silent under the breathless poignancy of an emotion which
ever seemed to sound within her depths unsuspected.
But when he said that she had made a new and completely different
man of him, she remembered his low-voiced when that change impended as
he held her by her wrists a moment, then dropped them. He had said,
half to himself: "You should have let me alone!"
Sometimes at noon she remembered this when they went out for
luncheon realizing they would never have been seated together in a
restaurant had she not satisfied her curiosity. She should have let
him alone; she knew that. She tried to wish that she had--tried to
regret everything, anything; and could not, even when within her the
faint sense of alarm awoke amid the softly unchangeable unreality of
these last six weeks of spring.
Was this then really love?--this drifting through alternating dreams
of shyness, tenderness, suspense, pierced at moments by tiny flashes
of fear, as lightning flickers, far buried in softly shrouded depths
of cloud?
She had long periods of silent and absorbed dreaming, conscious only
that she dreamed, but not of the dream itself.