Between Friends

Always, now, while she posed, she was looking at him with a still

intentness, as though he really wore a mask and she, breathlessly

vigilant, watched for the moment when he might forget and lift it.

But during the weeks that followed, if the mask were indeed only the

steady preoccupation that his visage wore, she seemed to learn

nothing more about him when his features lost their dark absorption

and he caught her eye and smiled. No, the smile revealed nothing

except another mask under the more serious cast of

concentration--only another disguise that covered whatever this man

might truly be deeper down--this masculine and unknown invader of

frontiers surrendered ere she had understood they were even

besieged.

And during these weeks in early spring their characteristics, even

characters, seemed to have shifted curiously and become reversed;

his was now the light, irresponsible, half-mocking badinage--almost

boyishly boisterous at times, as, for instance, when he stepped

forward after the pose and swung her laughingly from the

model-platform to her corner on the sofa.

"You pretty and clever little thing," he said, "why are you becoming

so serious and absent-minded?"

"Am I becoming so?"

"You are. You oughtn't to: you've made a new and completely

different man of me."

As though that were an admirable achievement, or even of any

particular importance. And yet she seemed to think it was both of

these when, resting against him, within the circle of his arm, still

shy and silent under the breathless poignancy of an emotion which

ever seemed to sound within her depths unsuspected.

But when he said that she had made a new and completely different

man of him, she remembered his low-voiced when that change impended as

he held her by her wrists a moment, then dropped them. He had said,

half to himself: "You should have let me alone!"

Sometimes at noon she remembered this when they went out for

luncheon realizing they would never have been seated together in a

restaurant had she not satisfied her curiosity. She should have let

him alone; she knew that. She tried to wish that she had--tried to

regret everything, anything; and could not, even when within her the

faint sense of alarm awoke amid the softly unchangeable unreality of

these last six weeks of spring.

Was this then really love?--this drifting through alternating dreams

of shyness, tenderness, suspense, pierced at moments by tiny flashes

of fear, as lightning flickers, far buried in softly shrouded depths

of cloud?

She had long periods of silent and absorbed dreaming, conscious only

that she dreamed, but not of the dream itself.