As he gazed wonderingly down through the darkness he thought of the friendlier, more intimate voice that had groped out through the housetop gloom to him that night. He wondered into what corner of the sleeping vastness of the city that wistful voice had crept. The mere thought and memory of it seemed to give a warm spot to the meaningless, shadowy solitude beneath him, like one small ember in a waste of ashes.
Repellier drew back from the window and stood in the dim light of the studio lamps.
"Miss Vaughan--Cordelia Vaughan--is a young Kentucky woman who writes books, and I understand one of her dramatized novels is soon to be put on the stage. People are petting her--petting her a good deal too much, this season--but still, she seems to stand it well."
"I suppose she has written quite a bit?" Hartley casually inquired.
"I've known her only since last year, and I don't read, you know. But they tell me she's clever--when she writes, I mean, for most of these bookish women, unfortunately, are trimmed back and stunted for the sake of the fruit."
Hartley looked round at Repellier, missing from the other's voice some note of enthusiasm which he had expected to be there. The older man's succeeding question, however, bridging as it apparently did some disrupted line of thought, adequately accounted for his judicial coldness of tone.
"Are you getting broken in to work over here, Hartley--to good, hard work?"
The younger man smiled. With him Euterpe and Eros, obviously, must not house together.
"Jolly well broken in," was all he answered.
"Work is our eternal redemption," Repellier said, with his hand on the younger man's shoulder. Then he sighed wearily. "But to a good many of us Americans a life of hurry, I guess, has become the only life of ease."
The lute forgetful of its note; The wing remembering not to fly In some sweet flight's mad ecstasy; The heart that failed to carve the form Since once the musing soul grew warm With love for her who sat for him Of too alluring moonbeam limb.
"The defeated heart," sighed the woman in black, "has the habit of burying its own dead!"--"The Silver Poppy."
For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was prone to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements.