shall it be?"

And, alas, she chose "The Statue and the Bust."




XII


He was disconcerted, but his sense of humor come to his rescue, and
although he read that passionate poem with its ominous warning to
hesitant lovers, with the proper emphasis and as much feeling as he
dared, he managed to make it a wholly impersonal performance. When
he finished he dropped the book and glanced over at his companion.
She was sitting forward with a rapt expression, her cheeks flushed,
her breath coming unevenly. But there was neither challenge nor
self-consciousness in her eyes. The sparkle had left them, but it
was their innocence, not their melting, that stirred him profoundly.
With her palimpsest mind she was a poet for the moment, not a woman.

Her manners never left her and she paid him a conventional little
compliment on his reading, then asked him if he believed that people
who could love like that had ever lived, or if such dramas were the
peculiar prerogative of the divinely gifted imagination.

He replied drily that a good many people in their own time loved
recklessly and even more disastrously, and then asked her
irresistibly (for he was a man if a wary one) if she had never loved
herself.