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“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 had been subdued by a newer knowledge, with a newer seriousness, this unaccustomed gravity had left her heart no less tender, and had deepened her capacity for emotion to depths as profound and unexplored as the sudden mystery of their discovery by herself.

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.

She was aware, too, of a curious loneliness within her, and dimly understood that it was the companion of a lifetime she was missing–her conscience. Where was it? Had it gone? Had it died? Were the little, inexplicable flashes of fear proof of its disintegration? Or its immortal vitality?