Though she did not know it, she expressed the whole fault in her system. A man reared in a more complex community than a fishing village would have divined her scheme, and the result would have been a prolonged but most delightful duel of wits and hearts.
But Code, by the very directness of his honesty, and simplicity of his nature, cut through the gauzy wrappings of this delectable package and went straight to its heart. And there he found nothing, because what little of the deeply genuine there lay in this woman's restless nature was disguised and shifted at the will of her caprice.
When Code had experienced the pleasure of lighting a genuine clear Havana cigar after many months of abstinence, she leaned across the table to him, her hands clasped before her.
"Code, what does loneliness represent to you?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know," he temporized, taken aback. "I don't go in for loneliness much; but when I do, why all I want is--well, let me see, a good game of quoits with the boys in front of the church, or a talk with my mother about how rich we are going to be some day when I get that partnership in the fishstand. I'm too busy to be lonely."
"And I'm too lonely to be busy!" He looked at her unbelievingly.
"You!" he cried. "Why, you have everything in the world; you can go anywhere, do anything, have the people about you that you want. You, lonely? I don't understand you."
"Well, I'll put it another way. Did you ever want something so hard that it hurt, and couldn't get it?"
"Yes, I wanted my father back after he died," said Code simply.
"And I wanted Jim after he died," added Elsa. "Those things are bad enough; but one gets used to them. What I mean especially is something we see about us all the time and have no chance of getting. Did you ever want something like that, so that it nearly killed you, and couldn't get it?"
Code was silent. The one rankling hurt of his whole life, after seemingly being healed, broke out afresh--the engagement of Nat Burns and Nellie Tanner.
He suddenly realized that, since seeing Elsa, he had not as much as remembered Nellie's existence, when usually her mental presence was not far from him. Elsa, with all her luxury and alluring feminine charms, seemed to cast a spell that bound him helpless like the music in the fairy stories. He liked the spell, and, after all she had done, he confessed to an extraordinary feeling for the enchantress.