“_She_ wore paradise feathers!” said cook and Eleanor together.
“That’s her,” he said, “but there’s nothing in it. She’s a highbrow. Reads books and all that. Last time she was here, she and him discussed the Ego Soul. The little bits I heard I couldn’t make head or tail of.”
“Funny for him to be discussing eggs,” she said.
It was not funny for Gordon Selsbury to discuss anything. With Heloise van Oynne there seemed to be no subject, from kidney beans to metaphysics, that he could not examine profitably. It is true that he did most of the talking, but her rapt gaze rectified deficiencies of speech.
Gordon sat with her that afternoon in the tearoom of the Coburg Hotel, and they were comparatively alone.
“There is something I have wanted to say to you ever since I met you, Heloise,” he said softly. “A month! It almost seems incredible! If our theories are substantial it is incredible. We met before in the Temple of Atlantis, where the bearded priests chanted the day through. And you were a great lady and I was a humble gladiator. That the gladiatorial games and even the factions of the circus have a more remote antiquity than Rome, I am certain. Who knows but that the last remnants of dying Atlantis were not the first peoples of Etruscan civilisation ...?”
Her fine eyes agreed with that theory. They said as plainly as though the words were spoken: “How brilliant of you to associate Etruria with the mythical civilisation of Atlantis!”
On the other hand, her eyes did not say many things that she thought.
“What is so fine about friendship,” Gordon was going on, “is that we have lifted common interest above the sordid range of philanderism.”
Her head was bent forward eagerly, enquiringly. Trenter had the same trick, only he looked pained.
“I mean”--Gordon Selsbury flicked a crumb of cake daintily from his knee--“we have never tarnished the bright surface of our friendship with that weakness which is so glibly styled ‘love.’”
“Oh!” Heloise van Oynne sat back in her basket chair. “That’s so,” she said, and if there was a sense of immense satisfaction in her tone, even one attuned to her spiritual wavelength would not have observed the circumstance.
“The perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding, the dovetailing of mind into mind, the oneness of a mutual soul--these transcend all sentient impressions, whatever be the label they bear.”