Your knowledge of art interests me.
I like your playing—it is like you.
You make me think of delightful things that have nothing to do with the ordinary run of my life.
Do you understand?”
“It is very nice,” she said, “if I do.”
She took a breath, softly, dramatically.
“You make me think vain things, you know.” (Her mouth was a delicious O.) “You paint a pretty picture.”
She was warm, flushed, suffused with a burst of her own temperament.
“You are like that,” he went on, insistently. “You make me feel like that all the time.
You know,” he added, leaning over her chair, “I sometimes think you have never lived. There is so much that would complete your perfectness.
I should like to send you abroad or take you—anyhow, you should go.
You are very wonderful to me.
Do you find me at all interesting to you?”
“Yes, but”—she paused—“you know I am afraid of all this and of you.”
Her mouth had that same delicious formation which had first attracted him.
“I don’t think we had better talk like this, do you?
Harold is very jealous, or would be.
What do you suppose Mrs. Cowperwood would think?”
“I know very well, but we needn’t stop to consider that now, need we?
It will do her no harm to let me talk to you.
Life is between individuals, Rita.
You and I have very much in common.
Don’t you see that?
You are infinitely the most interesting woman I have ever known.
You are bringing me something I have never known.
Don’t you see that?
I want you to tell me something truly. Look at me. You are not happy as you are, are you?
Not perfectly happy?”
“No.” She smoothed her fan with her fingers.
“Are you happy at all?”
“I thought I was once.
I’m not any more, I think.”
“It is so plain why,” he commented.
“You are so much more wonderful than your place gives you scope for.
You are an individual, not an acolyte to swing a censer for another.
Mr. Sohlberg is very interesting, but you can’t be happy that way.
It surprises me you haven’t seen it.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, with a touch of weariness, “but perhaps I have.”
He looked at her keenly, and she thrilled.
“I don’t think we’d better talk so here,” she replied. “You’d better be—”
He laid his hand on the back of her chair, almost touching her shoulder.
“Rita,” he said, using her given name again, “you wonderful woman!”
“Oh!” she breathed.
Cowperwood did not see Mrs. Sohlberg again for over a week—ten days exactly—when one afternoon Aileen came for him in a new kind of trap, having stopped first to pick up the Sohlbergs.
Harold was up in front with her and she had left a place behind for Cowperwood with Rita.
She did not in the vaguest way suspect how interested he was—his manner was so deceptive.
Aileen imagined that she was the superior woman of the two, the better-looking, the better-dressed, hence the more ensnaring.
She could not guess what a lure this woman’s temperament had for Cowperwood, who was so brisk, dynamic, seemingly unromantic, but who, just the same, in his nature concealed (under a very forceful exterior) a deep underlying element of romance and fire.
“This is charming,” he said, sinking down beside Rita.
“What a fine evening!