By the first of June Fashion had deserted the city with its winds and
fogs and dust, and Madeleine was one of the few that remained. Her
husband had intended to send her to Congress Springs in the mountains
of the Santa Clara Valley, but she seemed to be so much better that he
willingly let her stay on, congratulating himself on the results of his
treatment. She was no longer listless and was always singing at the
piano when he rushed in for his dinner.
If he had been told that the cure was effected by books he would have
been profoundly skeptical, and perhaps wisely so. But although
Madeleine felt an almost passionate gratitude for Masters, she gave him
little thought except when a new package of books arrived, or when she
discussed them briefly with him in Society. He had never called.
But her mind flowered like a bit of tropical country long neglected by
rain. She had thought that the very seeds of her mental desires were
dead, but they sprouted during a long uninterrupted afternoon and grew
so rapidly they intoxicated her. Masters had sent her in that first
offering poets who had not become fashionable in Boston when she left
it: Browning, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne; besides the Byron and
Shelley and Keats of her girlhood. He sent her Letters and Essays and
Memoirs and Biographies that she had never read and those that she had
and was glad to read again. He sent her books on art and she re-lived
her days in the galleries of Europe, understanding for the first time
what she had instinctively admired.
It was not only the sense of mental growth and expansion that
exhilarated her, after her long drought, but the translation to a new
world. She lived in the past in these lives of dead men; and as she
read the biographies of great painters and musicians she shared their
disappointments and forgot her own. Her emotional nature was in
constant vibration, and this phenomenon was the more dangerous, as she
would have argued--had she thought about it at all--that having been
diverted to the intellect it must necessarily remain there.
If she had belonged to a later generation no doubt she would have taken
to the pen herself, and artistic expression would--possibly--have
absorbed and safe-guarded her during the remainder of her genetic
years; but such a thing never occurred to her. She was too modest in
the face of master work, and only queer freakish women wrote, anyhow,
not ladies of her social status.
Although her thoughts rarely strayed to Masters, he hovered a sort of
beneficent god in the background of her consciousness, the author of
her new freedom and content; but it was only after an unusually long
talk with him at a large dinner given to a party of distinguished
visitors from Europe, shortly before Society left town, that she found
herself longing to discuss with him books that a week before would have
been sufficient in themselves.
The opportunity did not arise however until she had been for more than
a fortnight "alone" in San Francisco. She was returning from her daily
brisk walk when she met him at the door of the hotel. They naturally
entered and walked up the stairs together. She had immediately begun to
ply him with questions, and as she unlocked the door of her parlor she
invited him to enter.
He hesitated a moment. Nothing was farther from his intention than to
permit his interest in this charming lonely woman to deepen;
entanglements had proved fatal before to ambitious men; moreover he was
almost an intimate friend of her husband. But he had no reasonable
excuse, he had manifestly been sauntering when they met, and he had all
the fine courtesy of the South. He followed her into the hotel parlor
she had made unlike any other room in San Francisco, with the delicate
French furniture and hangings her mother had bought in Paris and given
her as a wedding present. A log fire was blazing. She waved her hand
toward an easy chair beside the hearth, threw aside her hat and lifted
her shining crushed hair with both hands, then ran over to a panelled
chest which the doctor had conceded to be handsome, but quite useless
as it was not even lined with cedar.
"I keep them in here," she exclaimed as gleefully as a naughty child;
and he had the uneasy sense of sharing a secret with her that isolated
them on a little oasis of their own in this lawless waste of San
Francisco.
She had opened the chest and was rummaging.
"What shall it be first? How I have longed to talk with you about a
dozen. On the whole I think I'd rather you'd read a poem to me. Do you
mind? I know you are not lazy--oh, no!--and I am sure you read
delightfully."
"I don't mind in the least," he said gallantly. (At all events he was
in for it.) "And I rather like the sound of my own voice. What shall it
be?"