Dulcie's voice faded to a whisper; Barres, seated beside her, leaned nearer, bending his head to listen.
"And _you_," she murmured again, "--if you want me."
"I always want you," he whispered laughingly, in return.
Esmé regarded the scene with weariness and chagrin.
"Come on," he said languidly to Mandel, "we'll buy her some flowers for the evil she does us. She'll need 'em; she'll be finished before this amateur sculptor finishes his blooming Arethusa."
"I'm going up to Northbrook in a day or two, Barres. If you change--change Dulcie's mind for her, just call me up at the Adolf Gerhardt's."
"Dulcie will call you up if she changes my mind."
"You know I haven't thought about the summer. What was your idea about it?"
"Yes. You'd want a couple of weeks in the country somewhere, wouldn't you?"
"I don't know. I never went away," she replied vaguely.
It occurred to him, now, that for all his pleasant toleration of Soane's little daughter during the two years and more of his residence in Dragon Court, he had never really interested himself in her well-being, never thought to enquire about anything which might really concern her. He had taken it for granted that most people have some change from the stifling, grinding, endless routine of their lives--some respite, some quiet interval for recovery and rest.
And so, returning from his own vacations, it never occurred to him that the shy girl whom he permitted within his precincts, when convenient, never knew any other break in the grey monotony--never left the dusty, soiled, and superheated city from one year's summer to another.
"We'll go up there," he said. "My family is accustomed to models I bring there for my summer work. You'll be very comfortable, and you'll feel quite at home. We live very simply at Foreland Farms. Everybody will be kind and nobody will bother you, and you can do exactly as you please, because we all do that at Foreland Farms. Will you come when I'm ready to go up?"
She gave him a sweet, confused glance from her grey eyes.
"Mind?" He smiled. "We never interfere with one another's affairs. It's not like many families, I fancy. We take it for granted that nobody in the family could do anything not entirely right. So we take that for granted and it's a jolly sensible arrangement."