The Cost [48]
"Very," said Pauline, lifelessly.
"Don't you think it would be a good match?" he went on.
"Very," she said, looking round wildly, as her breath came more and more quickly.
Langdon strolled up.
"Am I interrupting a family council?" he asked.
"Oh, no," Dumont replied, rising. "Take my chair." And he was gone.
"This room is too warm," said Pauline. "No, don't open the window. Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window behind her. It was a moonless, winter night--stars thronging the blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in the southern horizon.
When she had been walking there for a quarter of an hour the door-window opened and Langdon looked out. "Oh--there you are!" he said.
"Won't you join me?" Her tone assured him that he would not be intruding. He got a hat and overcoat and they walked up and down together.
"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while. "They make me appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity, and that I'm----there's nothing little enough to express the human atom where the earth's only a grain. And then they go on to taunt me with how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me--for ever. A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the heel of the Great Executioner."
"Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline. "But again--often, as a child--and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've gone where I could see them. And they seemed to draw all the fever and the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of--not happiness, not even content, but--courage."
They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he studying her face. It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so beautiful. She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her hair high above her forehead. She looked like a splendid plume dropped from the starry wing of night.
"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their family. And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the earthworms."
Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath, closed her eyes and opened them very wide.
"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what `to live' means."
"Then why don't you?" he asked--he liked to catch people in their confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts, not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.
"Because I'm a daughter--that's anchor number one. Because I'm a mother--that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife--that's anchor number three. And anchor number four--because I'm under the spell of inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in them. Tied, hands and feet!"
"Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton at life's banquet. It takes away my appetite."
She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It frightens ME away from the table."
XV.
GRADUATED PEARLS.
But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness then and when she met him at other houses.
"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps things before him in his career. Don't you think so?"
"Yes," said Pauline.
She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she originally set. She told herself she had reached the limit of endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys' growing intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it