Between Friends

When she came again to the studio, she was different, subdued,

evading, avoiding, smiling a little in her flushed diffidence at his

gay ease of manner--or assumption of both ease and gaiety.

He was inclined to rally her, tease her, but her reticence was not

all embarrassment. The lightest contact, the slightest caress from

him, added a seriousness to her face, making it very lovely under

its heightened color, and strangely childlike.

Model and master they would have remained no longer had it been for

him to say, he desiring now to make it a favor and concession on her

part to aid him professionally, she gravely insisting on

professionalism as the basis of whatever entente might develop

between them, as well as the only avowed excuse for her presence

there alone with him.

"Please. It's respectable," she insisted her agreeable, modulated

voice. "I had rather the reason for my coming here be

business--whatever else happens."

"What has happened," he said, balancing a handful of wet clay in one

hand and looking laughingly up at her, where she stood on the

model-stand, "is that a pretty girl strolled in here one day and

held up a mirror to a solemn ass who was stalking theatrically

through life. That solemn ass is very grateful for the glimpse he

had of himself. He behaved gratefully, didn't he?"

"Very," she said with a forced smile.

"Do you object to the manner in which he expressed his gratitude?"

She hung her head.

"No," she said.

After a while she raised her eyes, her head still lowered. He was

working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass under his

fingers.

She watched him curiously, not his hands, now, but his lean, intent

face, striving to penetrate that masculine mask, trying to

understand. Varying and odd reflections and emotions possessed her

in turn, and passed--wonder, bewilderment at herself, at him; a

slight sense of fear, then a brief and sudden access of shyness,

succeeded by the by glow of an emotion new and strange and deep. And

this, in turn, by vague bewilderment again, in which there was both

a hint of fear, and a tinge of something exquisite.

Within herself she was dimly conscious that a certain gaiety, an

irresponsibility and lightness had died out in her, perhaps

permanently, yet leaving no void. What it was that replaced these

she could not name--she only was conscious that if these had been

subdued by a newer knowledge, with a newer seriousness, this

unaccustomed gravity had left her heart no less tender, and had

deepened her capacity for emotion to depths as profound and

unexplored as the sudden mystery of their discovery by herself.