Athalie

Yes, of all men she had ever known, only Clive seemed real; and he

dominated every scene of her girlhood and her womanhood as her mother

had been the only really living centre of her childhood.

All else seemed to her like a moving and subdued background,--an

endless series of grey scenes vaguely painted through which figures

came and went, some shadowy and colourless as phantoms, some soberly

outlined, some delicately tinted--but all more or less subordinate,

more or less monochromatic, unimportant except for balance and

composition, as painters use indefinite shapes and shades so that the

eyes may more perfectly concentrate on the centre of their

inspiration.

And the centre of all, for her, was Clive. Since her mother's death

there had been no other point of view for her, no other focus for the

forces of her mind, no other real desire, no other content. He had

entered her child's life and had become, instantly, all that the

child-world held for her. And it was so through the years of her

girlhood. Absent, or during his brief reappearances, the central focus

of her heart and mind was Clive. And, in womanhood, all forces in her

mind and spirit and, now, of body, centred in this man who stood out

against the faded tapestry of the world all alone for her, the only

living thing on earth with which her heart had mated as a child, and

in which now her mind and spirit had found Nirvana.

All men, all women, seemed to have their shadowy being only to make

this man more real to her.

Friends came, remained, and went,--Cecil Reeve, gay, charmed with

everything, and, as always, mischievously ready to pay court to her;

Francis Hargrave, politely surprised but full of courteous admiration

for her good taste; John Lyndhurst, Grismer, Harry Ferris, Young

Welter, Arthur Ensart, and James Allys,--all were bidden for the day;

all came, marvelled in the several manners characteristic of them,

and finally went their various ways, serving only, as always, to make

clearer to her the fadeless memory of an absent man. For, to her, the

merest thought of him was more real, more warm and vivid, than all of

these, even while their eager eyes sought hers and their voices were

sounding in her ears.

Nina Grey came with Anne Randolph for a week-end; and then came Jeanne

Delauny, and Adele Millis. The memory of their visits lingered with

Athalie as long, perhaps, as the scent of roses hangs in a dim, still

room before the windows are open in the morning to the outer air.

The first of August a cicada droned from the hill-top woods and all

her garden became saturated with the homely and bewitching odour of

old-fashioned rockets.