A Study in Indifference

But the weeks passed and no word of love was spoken, and the woman in her began to ask why this should be. She was certain as she could be that her beauty had dazzled the lad when first he came to "Five Gables." She remembered what fervid glances he had turned upon her when first they met, how his eyes had expressed unbounded admiration, nay worship such as was unknown in the circles in which she moved. If this silent adoration flattered her for the moment, honesty played no little part in its success--for though there had been lovers who looked deep into her heart before, the majority carried but liabilities to her feet and, laying them there, would gladly have exchanged them for her father's cheques to salve their financial wounds. In Alban she had met for the first time a natural English lad who had no secrets to hide from her. "He will worship the ground upon which I walk," she had said in the mood of sundry novelettes borrowed from her maid. And this, in truth, the lad might very well have come to do.

But the weeks passed and Alban remained silent, and the declaration she had desired at first as an amusement now became a vital necessity to her fasting vanity. Believing that their surroundings at Hampstead, the formality, the servants, the splendor of "Five Gables," forbade that little comedy of love for which she hungered, she went off, in her father's absence, to their cottage at Henley, and compelling Alban to follow her, she played Phyllis to his Corydon with an ardor which could not have been surpassed. Aping the schoolgirl, she would wear her hair upon her shoulders, carry her gown shortened, and bare her sleeves to the suns of June. The rose garden became the arbor of her delights. "You shall love me," she said to herself--and in the determination a passion wholly vain and not a little hazardous found its birth and prospered.