The Heart Line 9

The Heart Line 9

Granthope watched her keenly. With his eyes and ears full of Fancy

Gray’s ardent, dramatic youth, sparkling with the sophistication of the

city, slangy, audacious, gay, this girl seemed almost unreal in her

delicacy and exquisite virginity, a creature of dreams and faery, the

personification of an ideal too fine and fragile for every-day. Her

face showed caste in every line. He was a little afraid of her. Her

bearing compelled not only respect, but, in a way, reverence—a tribute

he seldom had felt inclined to pay to the _mondaines_ who visited him.

 

His confidence, however, soon asserted itself. He had found that all

women were alike—there were, as in chess, several openings to his game,

but, once started, the strategy was simple.

 

"Well, how do you like my studio?"

 

"It’s like dreams I’ve had," she said. "I like it. It’s so simple."

 

"Most people think it too somber."

 

"It is somber; but that purple-black is wonderful in the way it takes

the light. And it’s all so different!"

 

"Yes, I flatter myself it is that. But I’m ’different’ myself."

 

"Are you?" She turned her eyes steadfastly upon him for the first time,

as if mentally appraising him, as he stood, six feet of virility,

handsome, vivid and nonchalant. The color which had risen to her cheeks

still remained.

 

"You are, too," he went on, examining her as deliberately.

 

She smiled faintly and took a seat by the table and removed her veil.

Her face was now clearly illuminated, and Granthope’s eyes, traveling

from feature to feature in quest of significant details, fell upon her

left cheek. His look was arrested at the sight of a brown velvety mole,

a veritable beauty-spot, heightening the color of her skin. It was

charming, making her face piquant and human. His hand went to his

forehead thoughtfully.

 

At the sight of this mark upon her cheek, something troubled him. His

mind, always alert to suggestive influences, registered the faintest

impression of a thought at first too elusive to be called an idea. It

was like the ultimate, dying ripple from some far-off shock to his

consciousness. The impact died almost as it reached him—a flash,

vaguely stimulating to his imagination, and then it was gone, its

mysterious message uncomprehended.

 

She watched him a little impatiently, seeming to resent his scrutiny.

Noticing this, he summoned his distracted attention and seated himself

at the table. But, from time to time, now, his glance darted to her

cheek surreptitiously, searching for the lost clue. He had learned the

value of such subtle intuitions and would not give up his efforts to

take advantage of this one.

 

She laid her bare hand upon the black velvet cushion beneath the light,

saying, "I’m sorry that something has disturbed you." She looked at

him, and then away.

 

"Why, nothing has disturbed me," he said. "Why should you think so?"

Even as he pulled himself together for this denial her quick perception

gave him another cause for wonder.

 

"I’m rather sensitive to other people’s moods sometimes. That’s one

reason why I came. I didn’t know but you might tell me something about

it—how far to trust it, perhaps—though I came, I confess, more from

curiosity."

 

Her air was still so detached that her conversational approaches seemed

almost experimental. She spoke with pauses between her phrases, while

her eyes, now showing full and clear gray, lit upon him only to rove

off, returned and departed again, but never rapidly, as if she sought

for her words here and there in the room, and brought them calmly back

to him. She did not shun a direct gaze, but her look wandered as her

thought wandered in its logical course, for the time seeming to forget

his presence.

 

He took her hand and felt of it, testing its quality and texture,

preparing himself for his speech. Her hand was long and slim, with

scarcely a fiber more flesh upon the bones than was necessary to cover

them admirably. He had no thought at first except to give his ordinary

routine of reading, but his study of her showed her to be an exceptional

character. She was beautiful, with the loveliness of an aristocratic and

slightly bewildering spiritual type. Her hand in his was magnetic,

delicious of contact, subtly alive even though not consciously

responsive. Other women with more obvious charm had left him cold.

She, aided by no suggestion of coquetry or complaisance, allured him.

She awakened in him a desire not wholly physical, although he could not

fail to regard her primarily in the sex relation that, so far, had been

his chief interest in women. She, as a woman, answered, in some secret

way, him, as a man. This was his first wave of feeling. Her hint

amused him, true as her intuition had been; she had stumbled upon his

embarrassment, no doubt, and had claimed prescience, a common enough

form of feminine conceit. There he had a valuable suggestion as to the

direction of her line of least resistance to his wiles.

 

Following upon this, as the first feeling of her unreality faded, upon

contact, came the thought of her as a wealthy and credulous girl, who

might minister to his ambitions. He was without real social

aspirations, except in so far as his success in the fashionable world

favored the game he was playing. Years of contact with credulity and

hypocrisy had carried him, mentally, too far to value the lionizing and

the hero-worship he had tasted from his smarter clients. But the

patronage of such a fair and finished creature as this girl, especially

if he could establish a more intimate relation, might secure the

permanence of his position and his opportunities. He saw vistas of

delight and satisfaction in such an acquaintance. He had had his fill

of silly women whose favors were paid for in ministrations to their

vanity. Such tribute, easy as it was for him with his facility, irked

him. Here, perhaps, was one who might hold his interest by her fineness

and her mentality, and by the very difficulty he might find in

impressing her. There would be zest to the pursuit.

 

Beneath these waves of feeling, however, and beneath his active

intelligence, there was an inchoate disturbance in some subconscious

stratum of his mind. He felt it only as the slight mental perplexity the

mole upon her cheek had caused; he had no time, now, to pursue that

incipient idea. His impression of her as a desirable, pleasurable

quarry incited him to devise the psychological method necessary for her

capture. He knew to a hair, usually, what he could do with women; but

now he was forced to gain time by a preamble in the conventional patter

of the palmist’s cult.

 

Her hand, it appeared, was of a mixed type, neither square nor conic,

with long fingers, inclined to be psychic. He remarked the

extraordinary sensitiveness denoted by their cushioned tips. Nails,

healthy and oval; knuckles indicating a good sense of order in mental

and physical life. She was, in short, of strong, vigorous mentality,

well-balanced, artistic, generous, liberal; but (he referred to the

Mount of Jupiter) with a tendency to be a looker-on rather than a sharer

in the ordinary social pleasures of life. Saturn, developed more toward

the finger, gave her a slightly melancholy temperament; Apollo showed a

great appreciation of the beautiful in nature, with no little critical

knowledge of art; Mercury was less developed, and implied a lack of

humor; Venus betrayed a well-controlled but warm feeling; it was

soft—she was, consequently, easily moved. Her thumb was wilful rather

than logical, her fingers suggested respectively, pride, perception,

self-respect, morbidity, love of the beautiful as distinguished from the

ornamental, tact.

 

He had thrown himself into a pose so habitual as to become almost

unconscious, though it was keyed to the theatrical pitch of his

picturesque appearance and surroundings. The girl’s __EXPRESSION__ showed,

to his alert eye, a slight disappointment at the conventionality of his

remarks. This spurred him to more originality and definiteness. He

tossed his hair back with one hand in a quick gesture and turned to the

lines in her palm, examining them first with a magnifying glass and then

tracing them with an ivory stylus. Her eyes were fixed upon his, as if

she were more interested in the manner than the matter of his task.

 

"You are the sort of person," he said, "who is, in a certain sense,

egoistic. That is, after a criticism of any one, you would immediately

ask yourself, ’Would I not have done the same thing, under the same

circumstances?’ You’re stupendously frank—you’d own up to anything, any

faults you thought you possessed; you’d even exaggerate a jestingly

ignoble confession of motives because you hate hypocrisy so much in

others. You are eminently fair and just, as you are generous. You have

none of the ordinary feminine arts of coquetry. If you liked a man you

would say so frankly."

 

It was typical of Granthope’s enthusiasm for his game that he dared thus

play it so boldly with his cards face up upon the table. His visitor

began to show more interest; it was evident that she appreciated the

ingeniousness of his phrasing. Her lip curved into a dainty smile. Her

eyes gleamed slyly, then withdrew their fire.

 

He continued: "You are slow in action, but when the time comes, you can

act swiftly without regard of the consequences. You are not prudish.

You are willing to look upon anything that can be regarded as evidence

as to the facts of life, even though you may not care to go into things

purely for the sake of experience. You are faithful and loyal, but you

are not of the type that believes ’the king can do no wrong’—you see

your friends’ faults and love them in spite of those faults, yet you are

absolutely indifferent to most persons who make no special appeal. You

are lazy, but physically, not mentally—there is no effort you will spare

yourself to think things out and get to the final solution of a

psychological or moral problem. You love modernness, complexity of

living, the wonderful adjustments that money and culture effect, but not

enough to endure the conventionality that sort of life demands. You are

not particularly economical—you’d never go all over your town for a

bargain or to ’pick up’ antiques—you would prefer to go to a good shop

and pay a fair price. You are fond of children—not of all children,

however, only bright and interesting ones. You are fond of dress in a

sensuous sort of way; that is, you like silk stockings, because they

feel cool and smooth; silk skirts, because they fall gracefully and make

a pleasant swish against your heels; furs, on account of the color and

softness, but none of these merely because of their richness or

splendor."

 

His face was intent, almost scowling, two vertical lines persisting

between his brows; his mouth was fixed. His concentration seemed to

hold no personal element; there was nothing to resent in the contact of

his fingers or the absorption of his gaze. Suddenly, however, he looked

up and smiled—he knew how to smile, did Granthope—and the relation

between them became so personal and intimate that she involuntarily drew

away her hand. He was instantly sensitive to this and by his attitude reassured her. Not, however, before she had blushed furiously, in spite of evident efforts to control herself.