Part 18 (2/2)
”Really, Katharine, I beg you to rid your mind of that exceedingly fallacious notion,” said Paul, laughing. ”I a.s.sure you I am to be read like a book.”
”A book in a strange language, then. I don't think I shall ever be able to read it,” said Katharine, shaking her head. And she drew down a rebuke upon herself for being solemn.
They had a tacit unwillingness to become serious, about this time; their conversation was made up of trivialities, and he never kissed her except on the tips of her fingers. They avoided any demonstration of feeling that might have revealed to them the anomaly of their position, and they mutually shrank from defining their relations towards one another.
They were standing together at the window, one day, looking down into Fountain Court, which was as hot and as dusty as ever in spite of the water that was playing into the basin in the middle.
”What are you thinking about?” he asked her, so suddenly that she was surprised into an answer.
”I was thinking how queer it is that you and I should be friends like this,” she replied, truthfully.
”What's the matter with our friends.h.i.+p, then?” he asked, in the prosaic manner he always a.s.sumed when she showed any sentiment. She laughed.
”There's nothing the matter with it, of course. You are the most unromantic person I ever knew. You seem to delight in divesting every little trivial incident of its sentiment. What makes you such a Vandal?”
”But, surely, you are not supposing that there _is_ any romance in our knowing each other, are you?”
”I never dreamed of such a thing,” retorted Katharine. ”I think there is more romance in your cigarette holder than in the whole of you!”
Sometimes she wondered if he were capable of deep feeling at all, or if his indifference were really a.s.sumed.
”I envy you your utter disregard of circ.u.mstance,” she once exclaimed to him. ”How did you learn it? Do you really never feel things, or is it only an easy way of getting through life?”
”I'm afraid I don't see what you are driving at. I dare say you are being very brilliant, but I fail to discern what I am expected to say.”
”You are not expected to say anything,” she said, playfully. ”That is the best of being a gigantic fraud like yourself; n.o.body ever does expect you to fulfil the ordinary requirements of every-day life. You might be a heathen G.o.d, who grins heartlessly while people try to propitiate him with the best they have to offer, and who eats up their gifts greedily when they are not looking.”
”Has all this any reference to me, might I ask?”
”I don't believe you've got any ordinary human feeling,” pursued Katharine. ”I don't believe you care for anybody or anything, so long as you are left alone. Why don't you say something, instead of staring at me as though I were a curiosity?”
”If you reflect, you will see that there has not been a single pause since you began to speak. Besides, why shouldn't you be catechised as well as myself? Where do you keep all your deep feeling, please? I haven't seen much of it, but perhaps I have no right to expect such a thing. No doubt you keep it all for some luckier person than myself.”
His tone was one of raillery, as hers had been when she began to talk.
But she startled him, as she did sometimes, by a sudden change of mood; and she flashed round upon him indignantly.
”It is horrible of you to laugh at me. You know you don't mean what you say; you know I have any amount of deep feeling. I hide it on purpose, because you don't like me to show it, you know you don't!
I--I think you are very unkind to me.”
He reached out his hand and stroked her hair gently; she was sitting a little away from him, and he could see the sensitive curve of her lower lip.
”Don't, child! One never knows how to take you. Another time you would have seen that I was only joking.”
”You have no right to joke about such a serious matter. You know it was a serious matter, now; wasn't it?”
”The most serious in the universe,” he a.s.sured her; and he brought his hand gently down her cheek, and laid it against her throat.
”You are only laughing; you always laugh at me,” she complained; but she bent her head, and kissed his hand softly. ”I feel like a wolf, sometimes,” she added, impetuously.
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