The faint ringing of the bell from outside that probably announced Arnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio, and at once a discussion began between the two men of the difference in the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to the pictorial sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, and Linda declared, “Dodge, you have never made a head of me. How very unflattering!”
“You're an affair for a painter,” he replied; “Goya or Alfred Stevens. No one but Goya could have found a white for you, with the quality of flower petals; and Stevens would have fixed you in an immortality of delicate color, surrounded by your Philadelphia garden.” He stood quite close to her, with his jacket dragged forward by hands thrust into its pockets, and he added at the end of a somber interrogation, “But if you would really like to know why--”
In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feeling for her--to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam in his eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely not normal. Pleydon, his love, terrified her. “No,” she said with an assumed hurried lightness, “don't try to explain. I must manage to survive the injury to my vanity.”
They left New York almost immediately, Pleydon suddenly determining to go with them; and later were scattered through the Hallet household. Vigné and her husband were temporarily living there; with their heads close together they were making endless computations, numerous floor plans and elevations. Linda, at the piano in the drawing-room, could hear them through the hall. Pleydon was lounging in a chair beyond her. She couldn't play but she was able, slowly, to pick out the notes of simple and familiar airs--echoes of Gluck and blurred motives of Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained; the sounds, however crude and disconnected, brought things back to her. What things, she replied to Pleydon's query, she didn't in the least know; but pleasant.
The fact that she understood so little depressed her with increasing frequency. It was well enough to be ignorant as a girl, or even as a young woman newly married; but she had left all that behind; she had lost her youth without any compensating gain of knowledge. Linda could not assure herself that life was clearer than it had been to her serious childhood. It had always been easily measured on the surface; she had had a very complete grasp of its material aspects almost at once, accomplishing exactly what she had planned. Perhaps this was all; and her trouble an evidence of weakness--the indecision, she saw with contempt, that kept so many people in a constant agitation of disappointment.