"Oh yes. I wanted—I wanted to see what was happening."
Averill asked me that, his gaze still fixed on me thoughtfully.
There was a pause of some seconds during which I could hear the unuttered question of all three, "Why don’t you tell us who you are?" It was a kindly question, with nothing but sympathy behind it. It was, in fact, a tacit offer of friendship, if I would only take it up. More plainly than they could have expressed themselves in words, it said: "We like you. We are ready to be your friends. Only give us the least little bit of encouragement. Link yourself up with something we know. Don’t be such a mystery, because mystery breeds suspicion."
When I let it go by Mildred Averill began to talk somewhat at random. She didn’t want that significant silence to be repeated. I had had my chance and I hadn’t taken it. Very well, my reasons would be respected, but I couldn’t keep people from wondering. That was what I knew she was saying, though her actual words referred to our expedition of a few days previously.
And of that she spoke with an intonation that associated me with herself. She and I had taken two nice young people of the working-classes for an outing. Let me hasten to say that there was no condescension in what she said; condescension wasn’t in her; there was only the implication that whatever the ground she stood on, I stood on that ground, too. She threw out a hint that as New York in these September days was barely waking from its summer lethargy, and there was little to fill time, we might all four do the same again.
In this she was reserved, nunlike, yet—what shall I say? What is there to say when a woman betrays what very few people perceive and one isn’t supposed to know to be there? There is a decoration on certain old Chinese porcelains which you can only see in special lights. A vase or a bowl may be of, let us say, a rich green monochrome. You may look at the thing a thousand times and nothing but the monochrome will be visible. Then one day the sun will strike it at a special angle, or the light may otherwise be what the artist did his work for, and beneath the green you will discern dragons or chrysanthemums in gold. Somewhat in that way the real Mildred Averill came out and withdrew, withdrew and came out, not so much according to changes in her as according to changes in the person observing her. When you saw her from one point of view she was diffident, demure, not colorless, but all of one color like a rare piece of monochrome. When you looked at her from another you saw the golden dragons and chrysanthemums. You might not have understood what they symbolized, but this much at least you would have known—that the gold was the gold of fire, all the more dangerous, perhaps, because it was banked down.