She believed that she could discern in him already the first hints of
middle age. His lifeless, brown hair was receding above his temples.
His small mustaches, which ought to have made him debonair, seemed on
his sallow face like the worthless disguise of a pessimist at the feast
of life.
Her look of compassion struck him silent. He smiled in self-contempt,
then uttered a sharp sigh, pressed his palm to his forehead, and
produced a tiny silver box, from which he took a tablet.
"More antipyrene?" she demanded reproachfully.
"My sinus is pretty bad to-night. This salt air blowing in from the
Sound----"
He declared that he was going away again. "His health made it
necessary." He had hung round New York long enough, enduring an
impossible climate because of an idiotic hope. He uttered the word
"Arizona." He spoke of hot deserts, solitudes under the stars, mirages
less mocking than his aspirations. As he contemplated her delicately
fervent face, her tapering, graceful body, wrapped like something very
precious in pale gold, his eyes glittered with tears.
"Dear Cornie----"
And once more she began the familiar rigmarole. Her lips shaped the
immemorial complaint, "Why isn't our friendship enough--why must we
always be clouding our old congeniality----" And so on. These
inexorable words, combined with her look of pity and reproach--a look
that seemed almost amorous on her fair face--gave him an impression of
immense perfidiousness.
He turned bitter. He asked her where the ideal suitor could be
loitering--the strange knight for whom she used to watch as a little
girl, the fairytale prince from another kingdom, who was to sweep her
off her feet by the force of his perfections, and carry her away.
As he spoke, there stole through the doorway the first notes of _Vienna
Carnival_. In the music room old Brantome had been persuaded to play
Schumann.
"I know, at least," said Cornelius, "that you haven't found him yet!"
In his voice there was a gloating that made her again turn toward him
that unique face of hers, whose brownish pallor, in harmony with her
large eyes and fluffy hair, appeared to reflect amid the shadows the
radiance disseminated from her dress. In his unhappy eyes she now
perceived something that had not been there before--a desperation, as
though his heart had suffered too long from a sense of inferiority to
the unknown and unrevealed antagonist, who was to win this treasure.
For an instant, in fact, there was something weakly ferocious, not
quite sane, in this visage that had been familiar to her since
childhood. Then his habitual, well-bred, wooden look, as a door might
shut on a glimpse of an inferno.
He muttered, in his throaty, queerly didactic voice:
"Well, one must be philosophical in this life. You'll teach me that,
won't you?" He got up, patting the pocket of his waistcoat, where he
kept the little vial of oil of peppermint, which he always touched to
his tongue when he threw aside his cigarette on his way to a dancing
partner. "Are they at it?" he asked, cocking his ear toward the music
of Schumann. "Or is it only that old chap hammering the piano?"
"Don't ask me to dance to-night," she returned, closing her eyes.
"I wasn't." With the parody of a merry smile, he explained, "You know
I can't dance with you any more. You know you make my legs tremble
like the devil."
With an exclamation intended for a laugh, looking unusually bored and
vacuous, he went out of the room like a man in an earthquake sedately
strolling away between reeling and crumbling walls.