"It was _her_ picture I sent you," said Miss Simpson. She was the first
to break the silence to which Miss Bingham abandoned them, but she did
not speak till her friend had closed the outer door behind her and was
tripping down the brick walk to the gate.
"Yes," said Langbourne, in a dryness which he could not keep himself
from using.
The girl must have felt it, and her voice faltered a very little as she
continued. "We--I--did it for fun. I meant to tell you. I--"
"Oh, that's all right," said Langbourne. "I had no business to expect
yours, or to send you mine." But he believed that he had; that his
faithful infatuation had somehow earned him the right to do what he had
done, and to hope for what he had not got; without formulating the fact,
he divined that she believed it too. Between the man-soul and the
woman-soul it can never go so far as it had gone in their case without
giving them claims upon each other which neither can justly deny.
She did not attempt to deny it. "I oughtn't to have done it, and I ought
to have told you at once--the next letter--but I--you said you were
coming, and I thought if you did come--I didn't really expect you to;
and it was all a joke,--off-hand."
It was very lame, but it was true, and it was piteous; yet Langbourne
could not relent. His grievance was not with what she had done, but what
she was; not what she really was, but what she materially was; her
looks, her figure, her stature, her whole presence, so different from
that which he had been carrying in his mind, and adoring for a year
past.
If it was ridiculous, and if with her sense of the ridiculous she felt
it so, she was unable to take it lightly, or to make him take it
lightly. At some faint gleams which passed over her face he felt himself
invited to regard it less seriously; but he did not try, even
provisionally, and they fell into a silence that neither seemed to have
the power of breaking.
It must be broken, however; something must be done; they could not sit
there dumb forever. He looked at the sheet of music on the piano and
said, "I see you have been trying that song. Do you like it?"
"Yes, very much," and now for the first time she got her voice fairly
above a whisper. She took the sheet down from the music-rest and looked
at the picture of the lithographed title. It was of a tiled roof lifted
among cypresses and laurels with pigeons strutting on it and sailing
over it.
"It was that picture," said Langbourne, since he must say something,
"that I believe I got the song for; it made me think of the roof of an
old Spanish house I saw in Southern California."
"It must be nice, out there," said Miss Simpson, absently staring at the
picture. She gathered herself together to add, pointlessly, "Juliet says
she's going to Europe. Have you ever been?"
"Not to Europe, no. I always feel as if I wanted to see my own country
first. Is she going soon?"
"Who? Juliet? Oh, no! She was just saying so. I don't believe she's
engaged her passage yet."
There was invitation to greater ease in this, and her voice began to
have the tender, coaxing quality which had thrilled his heart when he
heard it first. But the space of her variance from his ideal was between
them, and the voice reached him faintly across it.
The situation grew more and more painful for her, he could see, as well
as for him. She too was feeling the anomaly of their having been
intimates without being acquaintances. They necessarily met as strangers
after the exchange of letters in which they had spoken with the
confidence of friends.
Langbourne cast about in his mind for some middle ground where they
could come together without that effect of chance encounter which had
reduced them to silence. He could not recur to any of the things they
had written about; so far from wishing to do this, he had almost a
terror of touching upon them by accident, and he felt that she shrank
from them too, as if they involved a painful misunderstanding which
could not be put straight.
He asked questions about Upper Ashton Falls, but these led up to what
she had said of it in her letters; he tried to speak of the winter in
New York, and he remembered that every week he had given her a full
account of his life there. They must go beyond their letters or they
must fall far back of them.