"Her taste," Seyd had summed the room. "Your books?" he asked, with a nod at these astonishing shelves.
"Yes, no one else reads them." She added, with smiling directness: "Or could understand. If the dear mother read French, oh, what a bonfire we should have!"
"Some--in some things." Her brows arching in the effort for clear expression, she went on: "They know life, and one cannot but enjoy their beautiful style. But"--the delicate penciling drew even finer--"they see only with the eye. They are brilliant--as diamonds, and just as hard, cold. They analyze, dissect, probe life, take it apart, then forget to put it together. Love they see only as passion devoid of sympathy, affection, friendship. Their art is of the senses, their refinement--of manner. Under the veneer they are gross and hard."
To his astonishment she had expressed his own feeling for French literature, and, intensely curious, he went on probing her with questions, in his interest forgetting both his clothes and hunger till Don Luis interrupted.
"Lindita, the señor cannot live on words. The girls are calling dinner."
But after the meal--which was set out with silver, glass, napery, all of the finest, and served by brown maids who moved in and out with the soft stealth of bare feet--they went at their talk again, gleaning in fields of common knowledge while Don Luis alternately smoked and dozed by the fire.
It was a revelation for Seyd, and while he watched the play of feeling over her face, the flow of her soft color, the swift moods of the arched brows, and the lighting and lowering of dark eyes in unison with the change of her talk, his hardy resolution of yesterday--already sapped by his present luxurious comfort--underwent further disintegration.
"After all," he thought, "why shouldn't I run down and see them occasionally?"
Following Don Luis to his bedroom, he arrived at this conclusion, and in his argument with Conscience he reaffirmed it with even greater force. "After all the old man's kindness it would be blackly ungrateful to flout his hospitality."
"No reason why you should," Conscience conceded, but added the unpleasant rider, "providing you don't sail under false colors."
"Of course!" Seyd here grew quite huffy with Conscience. "I always intended to let her know I was married--not that it is necessary. I'm not so conceited as to think that she feels the slightest personal interest in me."