Читать книгу White Magic. A Novel онлайн

28 страница из 64

“Why, this is late for me,” he replied. “I have breakfast before sunrise and go up to the studio for an hour’s work before I come down here. You see, light—sunlight—is all-important with me. So I go to bed with the chickens.”

“You don’t live at the studio?” Then she reddened and hastily cried: “No—don’t answer. I forgot.”

At her suggestion they had been careful about letting slip things that might betray their identity in the outside world. This had become a fetich with them, as if betrayal would break the charm and end their friendship. “I never had anything like a romance in my life before,” she had said. “I suppose I seem very silly to you, but I want to do the best I can with this. You’ll humor me, won’t you?” And he agreed, with a superior smile at her folly—a smile not nearly so sincere as he fancied, for, like all men of his stamp, he was still the boy and would be all his life.

Though she came earlier she lingered later; once it was noon before she slowly paddled away in her graceful canoe with its high, curved ends. His uneasiness about what was going on in her head ended with her second visit; for she did not again speak of personal things and treated him in a charming, comradelike fashion that would have quieted the suspicions of a greater egotist than he. She made him do most of the talking—about painting and sculpture, about books and plays—the men he had known in Paris—about his curious or amusing experiences in out-of-the-way parts of Europe. It was flattering to have such a pretty listener, one so tireless, so interested; her many questions, the changes in her expressive countenance, the subtle sense of the sympathetic she radiated, were all proof convincing of her eagerness to hear, of her delight in what she heard.