She never forgot that. “I wonder why men do it?”
“It's the cultivation, perhaps, of that which Americans love best of all--”
“We of Poland dare to be emotional,” she said.
Peter smiled. “Sometimes I dare actually to be honest with you. Even Lonegan and I take no such liberties together.”
“It isn't a matter of courage,” she said. “You would dare anything. I know your quiet, deadly kind of courage. That's the first thing I felt about you.”
It was like Mowbray not to acknowledge that such a thing had been said.
“I came to you asleep. I wonder if I should always have remained asleep?”
“Your words are pretty, Peter. It makes me sad that you are going away.”
“You remember that company of soldiers that passed us yesterday as we walked? I had seen many such groups before--great shocky-haired fellows who ate and drank disgustingly. But yesterday you made me see that their blood is redder than the Little Father's--that empires ripen and go to seed only on a grander scale than turnips.” Her eyes were gleaming.
“We who are so wise, who have mastered ourselves, should be very good to the peasants--and not take what they have and kill them in wars.”
“Did I lead you to believe in any way that I felt myself mastered?” he asked quickly.
She touched his arm. “I was talking of the Fatherland,” she answered.
He had met this intensity of hers before. Her scorn was neither hot nor cold, but electric. So often when words failed her, Peter fancied himself lost in some superb wilderness... Her own gray tone was in the room to-day--her gray eyes and black hair that made the shadows seem gray; her face that no night could hide from him. Sometimes his glance was held to her lips--as one turns to the firelight. Passion there--or was it the higher thing, _compassion?_ There was bend and give to the black cloth she wore, as to the inflections of her voice. She could forget herself. That was the first and the inexhaustible charm.
It is true that she was very poor. This room which had become his sanctuary in Warsaw was in a humble house of a common quarter. She laughed at this, and at her many hours of work each day, for which the return was meager. There was the sweetest pathos to him in her little purse, and her pride in these matters was a thing of royalty.