Between Friends | Page 6

caught her wrists. "A lot you care
whether I am offended!"
She looked away from him, turning her profile. Her expression was
inscrutable. After a silence he dropped her wrists with a vague laugh.
"You should have let me alone," he said.
"'The woman tempted me,'" she repeated, still looking away from him.
He said nothing.
"Good night," she nodded, and turned toward the door.
He went with her, falling into step beside her. One arm slipped around
her waist as they entered the hallway. They walked slowly to the door.
He unlatched it, hesitated; she moved one foot forward, and he took a
step at the same time which brought her across his path so closely that
contact was unavoidable. And he kissed her.
"Oh," she said. "So you are human after all! I often wondered."
She looked up, trying to laugh, but could not seem to take it as coolly
as she might have wished to.
"Not that a kiss is very important in these days," she continued, "yet it
might interest you to hear that a friend of yours rather fancies me. He
wouldn't like you to do it. But--" She lifted her blue eyes with faint
malice--"What is a woman between friends?"
"Who is he?"
"Jack Graylock."
Drene remained motionless.

"I haven't encouraged him," she said. "Perhaps that is why."
"Why he fancies you?"
"Why he asked me to marry him. It was the only thing he had not
asked."
"He asked that?"
"After he realized it was the only way, I suppose," she said coolly.
Drene took her into his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth.
Looking up at him she said: "After all, he is your friend, isn't he?"
"A friend of many years. But, as you say, what is a woman between
friends?"
"I don't know," said the girl. And, still clasped in his arms, she bent her
head, thoughtfully, considering the question.
And as though she had come to some final conclusion, she raised her
head, lifted her eyes slowly, and her lips, to the man whose arms
enfolded her. It was her answer to his question, and her own.
When she had gone, he went back and stood again by the great window,
watching the cote on a neighboring roof, where the pigeons were
strutting and coquetting in the last rays of the western sun.

II
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