He decided that Deborah did not need any defence so he complacently ignored her contemptuous speech.
“Are you as lacking in ambition as you are in courage?” she inquired maliciously in her peculiar husky voice.
Dreeme nodded. He didn’t care what she thought as long as she left speedily. She could not rouse him to anger by anything she said. With an excitable gesture she stood up and paced swiftly about the room, her long shadow flickering across the atrociously-papered wall. Dreeme watched her objectively. She was magnificent. There was no doubt of that. Like a tigress. A great slumberous tigress in whose arteries ran a secret and smoldering flame. Full breasted, long in the thighs, wide cheekbones and great eyes, hair like a blue-black smoke curling over her white forehead, archaic mouth. He had pictured her in so many ways. Medusa. Astarte Syriaca. Wife of the Afreet. Tigress. A creature of the imagination compounded out of dark and passionate urges. Yet his veins ran slow now at the thought of her. She could not touch his emotions again as she had that first time in the lamp-lit library when he had felt her presence like a dim magic in the room. He could look at her coldly and say, “Please go. I do not want you here. I do not trust you. You belong in this unreal world and I am not a part of it. There is the shadow of blood on your mouth.” He even opened his mouth to say these things and then thought better of it and closed his lips tightly. She stopped in front of him, her face a few inches from his, and studied him fiercely. The bittersweet aroma of her hair rose about his nostrils. He thought fixedly of the frail ghostlike figure of Deborah and observed her coolly.
“You have a new mask,” she said shortly. “Where is my weak doctor now?”
“He never existed except in your imagination,” he replied.
In spite of her anger she smiled.
“Do you think so?” she said.
She continued to study his face. Her large understanding eyes were disconcerting and he looked away from her finally.
“Did you go to the mill?” she inquired.
“Don’t you know?” he returned.
“So did I,” she added. “But he was there waiting. I knew he was waiting for you. I told you that Burroughs saw us. I came here, then, and waited.”
Dreeme moved over to the table and she followed him, seating herself by the side of it.
“Did he tell you to come here?” he asked. “How could you have passed me on the road?”
“He did not see me. He does not know I am here,” she said. There was a flash of anger in her eyes. After a second she added:
“I cut through … in back of the Slater house. There is a path there. You must know it.”
He nodded absently. He didn’t care, after all.
“What do you want, anyway?” he demanded. “I’m tired. I want to sleep.”
She looked at him appraisingly.
“I want you to take me away from here,” she answered coolly.
He smiled at that and shook his head.
“Wait!” she said, lifting her hand. “I will be faithful to you. I will give you more than any woman has given any man. I will give you strength … which you lack, and intelligence … which you lack, and confidence … which you lack, and. … Do you want love? I have an eternity of it stored up inside me.”
She spread her arms and her ripe bosom rose with the gesture.
“I don’t want any of these things,” he said in a low voice.
“That little girl has befuddled you,” she said in an angry voice. “You are like a somnambulist, a man walking in his sleep and afraid to wake up. You are dreaming like a schoolboy of a little empty face. I tell you I will take you up on the mountaintops of the world and show you all the riches of Time. You can pick what you will and with me beside you it shall be yours. I will pour strength into you and make you one of the proudest of men.”
The lamp sputtered fitfully between them and Dreeme sat looking at her sleepily. She was like a Sibyl now, muttering some incantation. All that she did was in the vein of playacting. Even her rolling sentences seemed out of some old drama. Then, Dreeme thought of Westcott’s brief delirium and wondered how many of them Martha Westcott had heard to talk in this vein. Both of them were acting in life. Both of them were archaic masks.
“I don’t want the riches of Time,” he said wearily. “I’m satisfied as I am.”
He sat up suddenly.
“No!” he cried. “All I ask is to be let alone.”
“You don’t understand,” she said in a patient voice as though she was speaking to a child. “You are frightened and you don’t understand. You are frightened out of your wits at the idea of living life fully. You want to spend it in little ways beside a little fire with a little face in front of you. That is not life. That is merely a subterfuge for living. Life extends beyond the lighted square of the fireplace. The path leads upward to the high rocky places, to the granite cliffs, to the place where the free winds blow. There is a continual excitement there and no peace. The brain is sharpened in that rarefied atmosphere and the will is hardened. It is there that living is its own reward.”
Still he shook his head.
“I know!” she exclaimed fervently. Then she paused and seemed to cast about in her mind for some conclusive argument that might move him from his sleepy lethargy. “Shall I tell you about myself?” she asked at last. “Last night I tried to tell you what I thought, the sort of philosophy that I had built up out of the dreariness of my days. Shall I tell you who I am now?”
He
