Such insignificant details revealed the immediate range of the Powers that watched and waited close beside our chairs. That sudden, fixed expression in her eyes, for instance, when the Man brought in certain private papers, handed them to Julius who, after reading them, endorsed them with a modern fountain pen, then passed them on to me! That fountain pen and her accompanying remark--how incongruous and insignificant they were! Both seemed symbolical items in some dwindled, trivial scale of being!
“It isn’t everybody that’s got a professor for a secretary, Julius, is it?”
She said it with her mouth full, her elbows on the table, and only that other look in the watchful eyes seemed to contradict the awkward, untaught body. There was a flash of tenderness and passion in them, a pathetic questioning and wonder, as though she saw in her husband’s act an acknowledgment of dim forebodings in her own deep heart. She appealed, it seemed, to me. Was it that she divined he was already slipping from her, farewells all unsaid, yet that she was--inarticulate? ... The entire little scene, the words, the laughter and the look, were but evidence of an attempt to lift the mask. Her choice of words, their accent and pronunciation, that fountain pen, the endorsement, the stupid remark about myself--were all these lifted by those yearning eyes into the tragedy of a fateful good-bye message? ...
More significant still, though even less direct, was another moment--when the Man stretched his arm across the table to turn the lamp up. For in this unnecessary act she saw--the intuition came sharply to me--an effect of the approaching Powers upon his untutored soul. The wick was already high enough when, with an abrupt, impulsive movement, he stooped to turn it higher; and instantly Mrs. LeVallon was on her feet, her face first pale, then hotly flushed. She rose as though to strike him, then changed the gesture as if to ward a blow--almost to protect. It was an impetuous, revealing act.
Out of some similar impulse, too, only half understood, I sprang to her assistance.
“And heat,” she added quickly. “Good Lord! the room’s that hot, it’s like a furnace!”
She flashed a look of gratitude at me. What exactly was in her mind I cannot know, but in my own was the strange feeling that the less _visible_ fire in the air the better. An expression of perplexed alarm showed itself in the face of the faithful but inarticulate serving man. Unwittingly he had blundered. His distress was acute. I almost thought he would drop to his knees and lick his mistress’s hand for forgiveness.