"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Why--it's hard to say--" she hesitated, but evidently not at all in embarra.s.sment, looking at him with serious eyes, limpid and unafraid.

"I've been with boys and men a lot, of course, in my cla.s.ses and in the laboratories and everywhere, and I've found out that in most cases if the men and the girls really, really in their own hearts don't want to hurt each other, don't want to get something out of the other, but just want to be friends--why, they _can_ be! Psychologists and all the big-wigs say they can't be, I know--but, believe me!--I've tried it--and it's awfully nice, and it's a shame that everybody shouldn't know that lots of the time you _can_ do it--in spite of the folks who write the books! Maybe it wasn't so when the books were written, maybe it's only going to be so, later, if we all are as square as we can be now. But as a plain matter of fact, in one girl's experience, it's so, _now_! Of course," she modified by a sweeping qualification the audacity of her navely phrased, rashly innocent guess at a new possibility for humanity, "of course if the man's a _decent_ man."

Arnold had not taken his gaze for an instant from her gravely thoughtful eyes. He was quite pale. He looked astonishingly moved, startled, arrested. When she stopped, he said, almost at once, in a very queer voice as though it were forced out of him, "I'm not a decent man."

And then, quite as though he could endure no longer her clear, steady gaze, he covered his eyes with his hand. An instant later he had sprung up and walked rapidly away out to the low marble parapet which topped the terrace. His gesture, his action had been so eloquent of surprised, intolerable pain, that Sylvia ran after him, all one quick impulse to console. "Yes, you are, Arnold; yes, you are!" she said in a low, energetic tone, "you _are_!"

He made a quavering attempt to be whimsical. "I'd like to know what _you_ know about it!" he said.

"I know! I _know_!" she simply repeated.

He faced her in an exasperated shame. "Why, a girl like you can no more know what's done by a man like me ..." his lips twitched in a moral nausea.

"Oh ... what you've _done_ ..." said Sylvia ... "it's what you are!"

"What I _am_," repeated Arnold bitterly. "If I were worth my salt I'd hang myself before morning!" The heartsick excitement of a man on the crest of some moral crisis looked out luridly from his eyes.

Sylvia rose desperately to meet that crisis. "Look here, Arnold. I'm going to tell you something I've never spoken of to anybody ... not even Mother ... and I'm going to do it, so you'll _believe_ me when I say you're worth living. When I was eighteen years old I was a horrid, selfish, self-willed child. I suppose everybody's so at eighteen. I was just crazy for money and fine dresses and things like that, that we'd never had at home; and a man with a lot of money fell in love with me. It was my fault. I made him, though I didn't know then what I was doing, or at least I wouldn't let myself think what I was doing.

And I got engaged to him. I got engaged at half-past four in the afternoon, and at seven o'clock that evening I was running away from him, and I've never seen him since." Her voice went on steadily, but a quick hot wave of scarlet flamed up over her face. "He was not a decent man," she said briefly, and went on: "It frightened me almost to death before I got my bearings: I was just a little girl and I hadn't understood anything--and I don't _understand_ much now. But I did learn one thing from all that--I learned to know when a man isn't decent. I can't tell you how I know--it's all over him--it's all over me--it's his eyes, the way he stands, the expression of his mouth--I don't only see it--I feel it--I feel it the way a thermometer feels it when you put a match under the bulb ... I _know_!" She brought her extravagant, her preposterous, her ignorant, her incredibly convincing claims to an abrupt end.

"And you 'feel' that I ..." began Arnold, and could not go on.

"I'd like you for my brother," she said gently.

He tried to laugh at her, but the honest tears were in his eyes.

"You don't know what you're talking about, you silly dear," he said unsteadily, "but I'm awfully glad you came to Lydford."

With her instinct for avoiding breaks, rough places, Sylvia quickly glided into a transition from this speech back into less personal talk. "Another queer thing about that experience I've never understood:--it cured me of being so crazy about clothes. You wouldn't think it would have anything to do with _that_, would you? And I don't see how it did. Oh, I don't mean I don't dearly love pretty dresses now. I _do_. And I spend altogether too much time thinking about them--but it's not the same. Somehow the poison is out. I used to be like a drunkard who can't get a drink, when I saw girls have things I didn't. I suppose," she speculated philosophically, "I suppose any great jolt that shakes you up a lot, shakes things into different proportions."

"Say, that fellow must have been just about the limit!" Arnold's rather torpid imagination suddenly opened to the story he had heard.

"No, no!" said Sylvia. "As I look back on it, I make a lot more sense out of it" (she might have been, by her accent, fifty instead of twenty-three), "and I can see that he wasn't nearly as bad as I thought him. When I said he wasn't decent, I meant that he belonged in the Stone Age, and I'm twentieth-century. We didn't fit together. I suppose that's what we all mean when we say somebody isn't decent ...

that he's stayed behind in the procession. I don't mean that man was a degenerate or anything like that ... if he could have found a Stone Age woman he'd have ... they'd have made a good Stone Age marriage of it. But he _didn't_, the girl he...."

"Do you know, Sylvia," Arnold broke in wonderingly, "I never before in all my life had anybody speak to me of anything that really mattered.

And I never spoke this way myself. I've wanted to, lots of times; but I didn't know people ever did. And to think of its being a girl who does it for me, a girl who...." His astonishment was immense.

"Look here, Arnold," said Sylvia, with a good-natured peremptoriness.

"Let a girl be something besides a girl, can't you!"

But her attempt to change the tone to a light one failed. Apparently, now that Arnold had broken his long silence, he could not stop himself. He turned towards her with a pa.s.sionate gesture of bewilderment and cried: "Do you remember, before dinner, you asked me as a joke what was the use of anything, and I said I didn't know?

Well, I _don't!_ I've been getting sicker and sicker over everything.

What the devil _am_ I here for, anyhow!"

As he spoke, a girl's figure stepped from the house to the veranda, from the veranda to the turf of the terrace, and walked towards them.

She was tall, and strongly, beautifully built; around her small head was bound a smooth braid of dark hair. She walked with a long, free step and held her head high. As she came towards them, the moonlight full on her dark, proud, perfect face, she might have been the youthful Diana.

But it was no antique spirit which looked out of those frank, fearless eyes, and it was a very modern and colloquially American greeting which she now gave to the astonished young people. "Well, Sylvia, don't you know your own sister?" and "h.e.l.lo there, Arnold."

"Why, Judith _Marshall_!" cried Sylvia, falling upon her breathlessly.

"However in the world did you get _here_!"

Arnold said nothing. He had fallen back a step and now looked at the new-comer with a fixed, dazzled gaze.

CHAPTER XXIV

ANOTHER BRAND OF MODERN TALK

"Where's Judith?" said Arnold for sole greeting, as he saw Morrison at the piano and Sylvia sitting near it, cool and clear in a lacy white dress. Morrison lifted long fingers from the keys and said gravely, "She came through a moment ago, saying, '_Where's_ Arnold?' and went out through that door." His fingers dropped and Chopin's voice once more rose plaintively.

The sound of Arnold's precipitate rush across the room and out of the door was followed by a tinkle of laughter from Sylvia. Morrison looked around at her over his shoulder, with a flashing smile of mutual understanding, but he finished the prelude before he spoke. Then, without turning around, as he pulled out another sheet from the music heaped on the piano, he remarked: "If that French philosopher was right when he said no disease is as contagious as love-making, we may expect soon to find the very chairs and tables in this house clasped in each other's arms. Old as I am, I feel it going to my head, like a bed of full-blooming valerian."

Sylvia made no answer. She felt herself flushing, and could not trust her voice to be casual. He continued for a moment to thumb over the music aimlessly, as though waiting for her to speak.

The beautiful room, darkened against the midsummer heat, shimmered dimly in a transparent half-light, the vivid life of its bright chintz, its occasional bra.s.s, its clean, daring spots of crimson and purple flowers, subdued into a fabulous, half-seen richness. There was not a sound. The splendid heat of the early August afternoon flamed, and paused, and held its breath.

Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still pool, there floated the beginning of _Am Meer_. Sylvia sat, pa.s.sive to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody. She stared with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano. She was not thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the brooding head....

When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing, did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes.

When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as harmoniously as the music.... "Do you know what I wish you would do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think about you...."

"Forbidden?" asked Sylvia, very much astonished.

"There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly, "I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think about her."

A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?"

"Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "_Honor!_ Victoria was so evidently s.n.a.t.c.hing at you as a last hope for Arnold.

She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be strictly non-existent. But now that Arnold has found a character beautifully and archaically simple to match his own primitive needs, I don't see why I shouldn't enjoy a little civilized talk with you. In any case, it was absurd to think of _you_ for Arnold. It merely shows how driven poor Victoria was!"

Sylvia tried to speak lightly, although she was penetrated with pleasure at this explanation of his holding aloof. "Oh, _I_ like Arnold very much. I always have. There's something ... something sort of _touching_ about Arnold, don't you think? Though I must say that I've heard enough about the difference between training quail dogs and partridge dogs to last me the rest of my life. But that's rather touching too, his not knowing what to do with himself but fiddle around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough.

Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through darkest Thibet." She meditated over this hypothesis for a moment and then added with a nod of her head, "Oh yes, I like Arnold ever so much ... one kind of 'liking.'"

"Of course you like him," a.s.sented the older man, who had been watching her as she talked, and whose manner now, as he took up the word himself, resembled that of an exquisitely adroit angler, casting out the lightest, the most feathery, the most perfectly controlled of dry-flies. "You're too intelligent not to like everybody who's not base--and Arnold's not base. And he 'likes' you. If you had cared to waste one of your red-brown tresses on him, you could have drawn him by a single hair. But then, everybody 'likes' you."

"Old Mr. Sommerville doesn't!" said Sylvia, on an impulse.

Morrison looked at her admiringly, and put the tips of his fingers together with exquisite precision. "So you add second sight to your other accomplishments! How in the world could a girl of your age have the experience and intuition to feel that? Old Sommerville pa.s.ses for a great admirer of yours. You won't, I hope, go so uncannily far in your omniscience as to pretend to know _why_ he doesn't like you?"

"No, I won't," said Sylvia, "because I haven't the very faintest idea.

Have you?"