He lifted his eyes to see Florence on the step above him.
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SHE wore a gown of sheer white, with a mantle of Spanish lace drawn close over her sloping shoulders and the flowing lines of her arms. Above it her large gray eyes looked out luminously.
“What is it?” she asked. Her face was full of queries. She divined her crisis already upon her.
She read it through, dwelt on it a frowning space—looked at him while the frown smoothed itself.
His full under lip twitched with a suggestion half cruel, half sensitive. She saw he was suffering, but there was a confusion of feeling, something with which the letter had nothing to do.
“Let us go somewhere else,” she said. Her glance had traveled toward the open door.
He followed her through the library, dreading lest she pause there; but she went on into the conservatory.
He closed the door, shutting them into the room of glass. In the midst of the transparent walls, searched by the sun, they were alone. The north end where the outer door opened, the south end looking on the lift of the hill lawn, were screened thick with heliotrope and passion-vine. The west fronted the skirts of the terrace, the somber, lonely oak-plantation, the distant sea. They saw through glass the out-of-doors, spacious, fresh, moved by the wind. Within, the air was motionless, too hot, too sweet, with scents of newly watered flowers.
She handed the letter back to him as though it were a mere nothing, saying simply, “Hawtry was against us from the first. He had more influence than we.” She put it plural from habit.
“Hawtry was on the spot, not dawdling on the other side of the continent,” he answered sullenly. The way he put it was brutal to her.
“_I_ know the thing’s all right,” he said half to himself; “but the rest of ’em have to know it, too! I’ve got to make ’em! _That’s_ my failure. Florence—as a force I’m nothing. Lord! How I hate the public—and I’m just one of the least of ’em! That’s it,” he said. His chin was sunk on his breast.
“The public is slow to see and quick to change. What they think doesn’t matter with good work.”
Her mind was busy beyond mere saying. She had never heard him talk in this strain before. She could remember when he had not known that his work was good; and he said “_I_,” not “_we_.” She saw that marked an end. More—he not only separated himself from her, but he divided that self: the musician—the man, and called the man a failure. The letter was not responsible for that.