Julia shivered under his touch. "Why do you oblige me to go through the humiliation of telling you things about myself that you already see?"
Julia would not look at him. "You know I love you."
He was disconcerted for the moment, resenting the mysterious implication of obligation which he always found in such words. "Sister. Julia. In the environment where I met you, I never expected to meet a woman who had your deep reality. We must all go through terrible things to come to a true understanding of ourselves in the universe. I have been through just what you are passing through now, Julia. Let me be your friend and your husband's friend as no one else has ever been?"
Julia clasped her hands and pressed the palms together. "Of course you are my friend." She wondered if her feeling of amusement were insane.
Dudley was unhappy with himself but her visible misery stimulated him in a way he dared not explain.
The windows of Dudley's studio were open against the hot purplish night. Large, fixed stars shuddered above the factory roofs and the confusion of tenements. The still room seemed a vortex for the distant noises of the street. A fire gong clanged alarmingly. Some one whistled. Somewhere feet were shuffling and the rhythm of a bass viol marked jazz time with the savage monotony of a tom-tom's beat. There was a sinister harmony in the discordant blending of sound.
Dudley, when he opened his door to Laurence, was relieved by a sudden sense of intimate affection for the man before him.
Laurence said, "I lost my way. Have I disturbed you by coming so late?" He held out his hand with a slight air of reluctance.
Dudley was pained and rebuffed by the pleasant casual manner of his guest. He would have held Laurence's hand but that Laurence withdrew it. "I had nothing to do but wait for you," Dudley said. He took Laurence's hat and stick and drew forward a chair.
Laurence seated himself with strained ease, and scrutinized a half-finished picture that leaned on the mantel shelf opposite. "I've been reading some references to your work lately." As he glanced away from the study, his mouth twitched slightly and his hard smiling eyes were full of an instinctive defiance.
Dudley's inquisitive imagination was fired by the recognition of the secret voluptuous relationship between them. He held Laurence's gaze with a passionate expression of understanding which to Laurence was peculiarly offensive and disturbing. "Inspired idiocy," Dudley said. "I hope you won't judge me by the banal standards which govern my other critics." His light tone, as usual, was awkwardly assumed.