He was quiet at this, the smoke of his cigarette climbing bluely in
a space with the aqueous stillness of a lake's depths. "The same,"
he went on after a long pause; "nothing has touched you. I ought to
be relieved but, do you know, it frightens me. You are relentless.
You have no right, at the same time, to be beautiful. I have seen a
great many celebrated women at their best moments, but you are
lovelier than any. It isn't a simple affair of proportion and
features--I wish I could hold it in a phrase, the turn of a chisel.
I can't. It's deathless romance in a bang cut blackly across
heavenly blue." He was silent again, and Linda glad that he still
found her attractive. She discovered that the misery his presence
once caused her had entirely vanished, its place taken by an eager
interest in his affairs, a lightness of spirit at the realization
that, while his love for her might have grown calm, no other woman
possessed it.

At the dinner-table she listened--cool and fresh, Arnaud complained,
in spite of the heat--to the talk of the two men. By her side
Elouise Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faint
jangle of an old thin piano, the facts of a family connection or a
commendation of the Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, and
his conversation with Pleydon was strung with terms completely
unintelligible to her. It developed, finally, into an argument over
the treatment of the acanthus motive in rococo ornament. France was
summoned against Spain; the architectural degrading of Italy
deplored.... It amazed her that any one could remember so much.

Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation
of her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an
added obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. After