“Don’t rhyme—in English poetry?” he stammered, paling under the blow. But Miss Spear had sprung to her feet and stood looking down on him with the sportive but remote radiance of some woodland spirit.
“Oh, but what does all that matter? I don’t know what made me even speak of it.” She continued to look at him, and as she did so, the anxious groping expression of her shortsighted eyes, as she tried to read his, suddenly humanized her face and brought her close again. “It was just my incurable mania for taking everything to pieces. Gilding the lily—who was the fool who said that wasn’t worth doing? … But I shouldn’t have spoken, you know, Vance, if I didn’t believe you have the gift … the real gift … ‘the sublime awkwardness that belittles talent,’ as George Frenside calls it …”
His heart swelled as he listened. How she knew how to bind up the hurts she made! “The sublime awkwardness …” He trembled with the shock of the phrase. Who talked or wrote like that, he wondered? Was it anyone he could see, or whose books he could get hold of—in the Willows library, perhaps? “Who’s that you spoke of?” he asked breathlessly.
“The man who can talk to you better than anybody else about English poetry.”
“Oh, do you know him? Can I see him? Is he alive?”
To each question Miss Spear, still looking down on him, nodded her assent. “He’s the friend I spoke of just now. He’s staying at Eaglewood. He’s the literary critic of The Hour.” She watched the effect of this announcement with her sleepy narrowed glance. “I’ll bring him down to see you some day—the day I show you the Willows library,” she said.
Vance had never heard of Frenside, or the paper called The Hour; but the assurance with which she pronounced the names stamped them with immediate importance. His heart was beating furiously; but such shining promises were no longer enough for him. Upton’s allusions to Miss Spear’s unreliability and elusiveness came back to him; and he remembered with a new resentfulness his hours of waiting at Miss Lorburn’s door. Perhaps something of this incredulity showed in his eyes, for Miss Spear added, with one of her sudden touches of gentleness: “I can’t tell you now just what day; but I’ll leave word with Upton at the nursery, I promise I will. And now come, Vance, we must pack up and start. Our sunrise isn’t ours any longer. It belongs to the whole stupid world. …”
X
Waking near noon that day from the sleep into which she had fallen after the vigil on Thundertop, Héloïse Spear sat up in bed and thought: “What’s wrong?”
She stretched her arms above her head, pushed back her hair from her sleepy eyes, and looked about her room, which was cooled by the soft green light filtered through the leaves of the ancient trumpet creeper above her window. For a moment or two the present was drowned in the remembered blaze of the sunrise, and the enjoyment of the hunger satisfied beside the pool; but already she knew that—as was almost invariable in her experience—something disagreeable lurked in the heart of her memories: as if every enjoyment in life had to be bought by a bother.
“That boy has eyes—I was right,” she thought; and then, immediately: “Oh, I know, the motor!” For she had remembered, in the act of re-evoking young Weston, that on the way home the car had stopped suddenly, a mile or more above Eaglewood, and that, after a long struggle (during which he had stood helplessly watching her, seemingly without an idea as to how he might come to her aid) they had had to abandon it by the roadside, and she had parted with her companion at the Eaglewood gates after telling him how to find his way home on foot. She herself had meant to take a couple of hours of sleep, and then slip out early to catch the man-of-all-work before the household was up, and persuade him to get the delinquent motor home somehow. But as soon as she had undressed, and thrown herself on her bed, she sank into the bottomless sleep of youth; and here it was nearly lunchtime, and everybody downstairs, and the absence of the motor doubtless already discovered! And, with matters still undecided between herself and Lewis Tarrant, she had not especially wanted him to know that she had been out without him to see the sunrise—the more so as he would never believe she had gone up to Thundertop unaccompanied.
Ah, how she envied the girls of her age who had their own cars, who led their own lives, sometimes even had their own bachelor flats in New York! Except as a means to independence riches were nothing to her; and to acquire them by marriage, and then coldly make use of them for her own purposes, was as distasteful to her as anything in her present life. And yet she longed for freedom, and saw no other way to it. If only her eager interest in life had been matched by some creative talent! She could
