Eliza's countenance was as tenderly hued as the pearly haze that overlay the far hills; faint, mauve shadows deepened the blueness of her eyes; her mouth, slightly parted, held the fragile pink of coral; a tinge of weariness upon her bore an infinite appeal--her relaxed, drooping body filled him with a gusty longing to put his arms about her shoulders and hold her secure against all fatigue, against the assaults of time itself.
He had never before driven such an impatient and hasty animal; at the slightest slackening of the reins the horse broke into a sharp trot; and, beyond doubt, he could walk faster than any other brute alive. Already they were at the entrance to the driveway; the house appeared to hurry forward to intercept them. Eliza pressed a button, and a man crossed the grass to the roan's head. They descended, and she lingered on the steps with a murmur of gratitude. “Mrs. Dreen telephoned Ranke to meet the eight-forty,” a servant in the doorway replied to Eliza's query; “she's having dinner in town with Mr. Dreen.”
Eliza turned with a gesture of appeal. “Save me from a solitary pudding,” she petitioned Anthony; “you can go back with Ranke.... On the porch, such fun--father detests candles.” The voicing of his acceptance he felt to be an absurd formality. “Then if you can amuse yourself,” she announced, “I'll vanish for a little... cigars in the library and victrola in the hall.”
He crossed the sod to the porch on the other face of the house, and sat watching the day fade from the valley below. A violet blur of smoke overhung the chimney of the Ellerton Waterworks, printed thinly on the sky. A sense of detachment from that familiar scene enveloped him--the base ball field, the defunct garage, places and details, customary, normal, retreated into the distance, it seemed into the past, gathering upon the horizon of his thoughts as the roofs of Ellerton huddled beyond the hills, vanishing into shadows that inexorably deepened, blotted out the old aspects, stilled the accustomed voices, sounds.
A servant appeared, and placed a table upon the tiles, spreading a blanched cloth, gleaming crystal and silver. A low bowl of shadowy wood violets was ranged in the centre, and hooded candles lighted, spilling over the table, the flowers, a pale, auriferous pool of light in the purpling dusk. When Eliza followed, in filmy white, she seemed half materialized from the haunting vision of poignant beauty at the back of his brain. She was like moonlight, still and yet disturbing, veiled in illusion, in strange, ethereal influences that set athrill within him emotions immaterial, potent, snowy longing, for which he had no name.