Between Friends

He went with her, falling into step beside her. One arm slipped around her waist as they entered the hallway. They walked slowly to the door. He unlatched it, hesitated; she moved one foot forward, and he took a step at the same time which brought her across his path so closely that contact was unavoidable. And he kissed her.

“Oh,” she said. “So you are human after all! I often wondered.”

She looked up, trying to laugh, but could not seem to take it as coolly as she might have wished to.

“Not that a kiss is very important in these days,” she continued, “yet it might interest you to hear that a friend of yours rather fancies me. He wouldn’t like you to do it. But—” She lifted her blue eyes with faint malice—“What is a woman between friends?”

“Who is he?”

“Jack Graylock.”

Drene remained motionless.

“I haven’t encouraged him,” she said. “Perhaps that is why.”

“Why he fancies you?”

“Why he asked me to marry him. It was the only thing he had not asked.”

“He asked that?”

“After he realized it was the only way, I suppose,” she said coolly. Drene took her into his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth. Looking up at him she said: “After all, he is your friend, isn’t he?”

“A friend of many years. But, as you say, what is a woman between friends?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl. And, still clasped in his arms, she bent her head, thoughtfully, considering the question.

And as though she had come to some final conclusion, she raised her head, lifted her eyes slowly, and her lips, to the man whose arms enfolded her. It was her answer to his question, and her own.

When she had gone, he went back and stood again by the great window, watching the cote on a neighboring roof, where the pigeons were strutting and coquetting in the last rays of the western sun.

II

When she came again to the studio, she was different, subdued, evading, avoiding, smiling a little in her flushed diffidence at his gay ease of manner—or assumption of both ease and gaiety.

He was inclined to rally her, tease her, but her reticence was not all embarrassment. The lightest contact, the slightest caress from him, added a seriousness to her face, making it very lovely under its heightened color, and strangely childlike.

Model and master they would have remained no longer had it been for him to say, he desiring now to make it a favor and concession on her part to aid him professionally, she gravely insisting on professionalism as the basis of whatever entente might develop between them, as well as the only avowed excuse for her presence there alone with him.

“Please. It’s respectable,” she insisted her agreeable, modulated voice. “I had rather the reason for my coming here be business—whatever else happens.”

“What has happened,” he said, balancing a handful of wet clay in one hand and looking laughingly up at her, where she stood on the model-stand, “is that a pretty girl strolled in here one day and held up a mirror to a solemn ass who was stalking theatrically through life. That solemn ass is very grateful for the glimpse he had of himself. He behaved gratefully, didn’t he?”

“Very,” she said with a forced smile.

“Do you object to the manner in which he expressed his gratitude?”

She hung her head.

“No,” she said.

After a while she raised her eyes, her head still lowered. He was working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass under his fingers.

She watched him curiously, not his hands, now, but his lean, intent face, striving to penetrate that masculine mask, trying to understand. Varying and odd reflections and emotions possessed her in turn, and passed—wonder, bewilderment at herself, at him; a slight sense of fear, then a brief and sudden access of shyness, succeeded by the by glow of an emotion new and strange and deep. And this, in turn, by vague bewilderment again, in which there was both a hint of fear, and a tinge of something exquisite.

Within herself she was dimly conscious that a certain gaiety, an irresponsibility and lightness had died out in her, perhaps permanently, yet leaving no void. What it was that replaced these she could not name—she only was conscious that if these had been subdued by a newer knowledge, with a newer seriousness, this unaccustomed gravity had left her heart no less tender, and had deepened her capacity for emotion to depths as profound and unexplored as the sudden mystery of their discovery by herself.

Always, now, while she posed, she was looking at him with a still intentness, as though he really wore a mask and she, breathlessly vigilant, watched for the moment when he might forget and lift it.

But during the weeks that followed, if the mask were indeed only the steady preoccupation that his visage wore, she seemed to learn nothing more about him when his features lost their dark absorption and he caught her eye and smiled. No, the smile revealed nothing except another mask under the more serious cast of concentration—only another disguise that covered whatever this man might truly be deeper down—this masculine and unknown invader of frontiers surrendered ere she had understood they were even besieged.

And during these weeks in early spring their characteristics, even characters, seemed to have shifted curiously and become reversed; his was now the light, irresponsible, half-mocking badinage—almost boyishly boisterous at times, as, for instance, when he stepped forward after the pose and swung her laughingly from the model-platform to her corner on the sofa.

“You pretty and clever little thing,” he said, “why are you becoming so serious and absent-minded?”

“Am I becoming so?”

“You are. You oughtn’t to: you’ve made a new and completely different man of me.”

As though that were an admirable achievement, or even of any particular importance. And yet she seemed to think it was both of these when, resting against him, within the circle of his arm, still shy and silent under the breathless poignancy of an emotion which ever seemed to sound within her depths unsuspected.

But when he said that she had made a new and completely different man of him, she remembered his low-voiced when that change impended as he held her by her wrists a moment, then dropped them. He had said, half to himself: “You should have let me alone!”

Sometimes at noon she remembered this when they went out for luncheon realizing they would never have been seated together in a restaurant had she not satisfied her curiosity. She should have let him alone; she knew that. She tried to wish that she had—tried to regret everything, anything; and could not, even when within her the faint sense of alarm awoke amid the softly unchangeable unreality of these last six weeks of spring.

Was this then really love?—this drifting through alternating dreams of shyness, tenderness, suspense, pierced at moments by tiny flashes of fear, as lightning flickers, far buried in softly shrouded depths of cloud?

She had long periods of silent and absorbed dreaming, conscious only that she dreamed, but not of the dream itself.

She was aware, too, of a curious loneliness within her, and dimly understood that it was the companion of a lifetime she was missing—her conscience. Where was it? Had it gone? Had it died? Were the little, inexplicable flashes of fear proof of its disintegration? Or its immortal vitality?

Dead, dormant, departed, she knew not which, she was dully aware of its loss—dimly and childishly troubled that she could remember nothing to be sorry for. And there was so much.

Men in his profession who knew him began to look askance at him and her, amused or otherwise, according to their individual characters.

That Cecile White went about more or less with the sculptor Drene was a nine days’ gossip among circles familiar to them both, and was forgotten—as are all wonders—in nine days.

Some of his acquaintances recalled what had been supposed to be the tragedy of his life, mentioning a woman’s name, and a man’s—Drene’s closest friend. But gossip does not last long among the busy—not that the busy are incapable of gossip, but they finish with it quickly, having other matters to think about.

Even Quair, after recovering from his wonder that his own condescending advances had been ignored, bestowed his fatuously inflammable attentions elsewhere.

He had been inclined to complain one day in the studio, when he and Guilder visited Drene professionally; and Guilder looked at his dapper confrere in surprise and slight disgust; and Drene, at first bored, grew irritable.

“What are you talking about?” he said sharply.

“I’m talking about Cecile White,” continued Quair, looking rather oddly at the sculptor out of his slightly prominent eyes. “I didn’t suppose you could be interested in any woman—not that I mind your interfering with any little affair between Cecile and me—”

“There wasn’t any.”