He had held a bit of the taffeta to her cheek.

"It is delicious, Natalie," he said. "It makes your eyes as blue as the sea."

"Always a decorator!" she had replied, smiling.

And, standing in her blue room, the first day of her arrival, and frowning at her reflection, she remembered his reply.

"Because I have no right, with you, to be anything else." He had stopped for a moment, and had absently folded and refolded the bit of blue silk.

Suddenly he said, "What do you think I am going to do, now that our work together is done? Have you ever thought about that, Natalie?"

"You are coming often to enjoy your handiwork?"

He had made an impulsive gesture.

"I'm not coming. I've been seeing too much of you as it is. If you want the truth, I'm just wretchedly unhappy, Natalie. You know I'm in love with you, don't you?"

"I believe you think you are."

"Don't laugh." He almost snarled. "I may laugh at my idiocy, but you haven't any right to. I know I'm ridiculous. I've known it for months.

But it's pretty serious for me."

He had meant it. There could be no doubt of that. It is the curious quality of very selfish women that they inspire a certain sort of love.

They are likely to be loved often, even tho the devotion they inspire is neither deep nor lasting. Big and single-hearted women are loved by one man, and that forever.

Natalie had not laughed, but she had done what was almost as bad. She had patted him on the arm.

"Don't talk like that," she said, gently. "You are all I have now, Rodney, and I don't want to lose you. I'm suffering horribly these days.

You're my greatest comfort."

"I've heard you say that of a chair."

"As for loving me, you must not talk like that. Under the circ.u.mstances, it's indelicate."

"Oh!" he had said, and looked at her quickly. "I can love you, but it's indelicate to tell you about it!"

"I am married, Rodney."

"Good G.o.d, do you think I ever forget it?"

There was a real change in their relationship, but neither of them understood it. The change was that Rodney was no longer playing. Little by little he had dropped his artistic posing for her benefit, his cynical cleverness, his adroit simulation of pa.s.sion. He no longer dramatized himself, because rather often he forgot himself entirely. His pa.s.sion had ceased to be spurious, and it was none the less real because he loved not a real woman, but one of his own artistic creation.

He saw in Natalie a misunderstood and suffering woman, bearing the burdens he knew of with dignity and a certain beauty. And behind her slightly theatrical silences he guessed at other griefs, n.o.bly borne and only gently intimated. He developed, after a time, a certain suspicion of Clayton, not of his conduct but of his character. These big men were often hard. It was that quality which made them successful. They married tender, gentle girls, and then repressed and trampled on them.

Natalie became, in his mind, a crushed and broken thing, infinitely lonely and pathetic. And, without in the least understanding, Natalie instinctively knew it was when she was wistful and dependent that he found her most attractive, and became wistful and dependent to a point that imposed even on herself.

"I've been very selfish with you, Rodney, dear," she said, lifting sad eyes to his. "I am going to be better. You must come often this summer, and I'll have some nice girls for you to play with."

"Thank you," he said, stiffly.

"We'll have to be as gay as we can," she sighed. "I'm just a little dreary these days, you know."

It was rather absurd that they were in a shop, and that the clerk should return just then with curtain cords, and that the discussion of certain shades of yellow made an anti-climax to it all. But in the car, later, he turned to her, roughly.

"You needn't ask any girls for me," he said. "I only want one woman, and if I can't have her I don't want any one."

At first the very fact that he could not have her had been, unconsciously, the secret of her attraction. She was a perfect thing, and unattainable. He could sigh for her with longing and perfect safety.

But as time went on, with that incapacity of any human emotion to stand still, but either to go on or to go back, his pa.s.sion took on a more human and less poetic aspect. She satisfied him less, and he wanted more.

For one thing, he dreamed that strange dream of mankind, of making ice burn, of turning snow to fire. The old chimera of turning the cold woman to warmth through his own pa.s.sion began to obsess him. Sometimes he watched Natalie, and had strange fancies. He saw her lit from within by a fire, which was not the reflection of his, but was recklessly her own.

How wonderful she would be, he thought. And at those times he had wild visions of going away with her into some beautiful wilderness and there teaching her what she had missed in life.

But altho now he always wanted her, he was not always thinking of a wilderness. It was in his own world that he wanted her, to fit beautifully into his house, to move, exquisitely dressed, through ball-rooms beside him. He wanted her, at those times, as the most perfect of all his treasures. He was still a collector!

The summer only served to increase his pa.s.sion. During the long hot days, when Clayton was abroad or in Washington, or working late at night, as he frequently did how, they were much together. Natalie's plans for gayety had failed dismally. The city and the country houses near were entirely lacking in men. She found it a real grievance.

"I don't know what we are coming to," she complained. "The country club is like a girl's boarding-school. I wish to heaven the war was over, and things were sensible again."

So, during his week-end visits, they spent most of the time together.

There were always girls there, and now and then a few men, who always explained immediately that they had been turned down for the service, or were going in the fall.

"I'm sure somebody has to stay home and attend to things here," she said to him one August night. "But even when they are in America, they are rushing about, pretending to do things. One would think to see Clayton that he is the entire government. It's absurd."

"I wish I could go," he said unexpectedly.

"Don't be idiotic. You're much too old."

"Not as old as Clay."

"Oh, Clay! He's in a cla.s.s by himself." She laughed lightly.

"Where is he now?"

"In France, I think. Probably telling them how to run the war."

"When is he coming back?"

"I don't know. What do you mean by wishing you could go?"

"Do you want me to tell you the truth?"

"Not if it's disagreeable."

"Well, I will, and it's not very agreeable. I can't keep this up, Natalie. I can't keep on coming here, being in Clayton's house, and eating his bread, while I'm in love with his wife. It isn't decent."

He flung away his cigaret, and bent forward.

"Don't you see that?" he asked gently. "Not while he is working for the country, and Graham is abroad."