They laughed and sat down to a silent meal. When it was ended, and the men took their cigarettes to the fireplace, she said: "I wish you would both do me a favor to-day."
"We will! Name it!" They spoke at the same time.
She turned toward them with an earnestness which she had scarcely meant to betray.
"Go out, both of you, and leave me here alone a while."
Lawrence was silent. Her words and her tone sent a sharp pain through him, and he wondered if she were ill. He wanted to say something to her, started to do so, checked himself, and laughed embarrassedly.
Philip stared at her. He noticed the pale face and the dark rings under her eyes.
"Why, certainly," he said, and rose. "You aren't looking well, Claire. Is anything seriously wrong?" He looked at her again with the same unconsciously tender warmth in his eyes.
She saw it, flushed angrily, wanted to scream at him, and said simply, "No, I just want to think, and want it quiet. You two talk too much about yourselves and about things that you don't understand."
"Very true"--Lawrence also had risen--"if I did understand them, I'd show humanity how to stop being animals and be men."
"While as it is," she said nervously, "you allow them to blunder along and help the good work out by making plenty of trouble for them by your own blind shortness of vision."
He stood, wondering at her. How had he unintentionally hurt her, and what exactly did she mean?
Philip laughed heartily. "A just judgment on him for his sorry view of the world," he commented, opening the door.
"We'll tramp back into the hills," he said to Lawrence when they were both outside, "and see what there is of deficient imagination in them."
"There isn't," Lawrence said quietly; "they and the ocean are testimonials to the real potential power of an otherwise very faulty artist."
Left alone, Claire worked furiously at setting the house to rights. Her nervous state led her to throw herself into the work with an energy that kept her from thinking. She sought for things to do with the desperation of a person whose only escape from the furies that followed him is utter physical exhaustion. When the cabin had been arranged and rearranged until there was no possible excuse for further effort, she took her heavy man's coat from its place and stepped out upon the snow-covered plateau before the house.