She shrugged. "I knew you were a dreamer—captivated by a vision. Suppose you had to see me pinning on store curls?" "I’d help pin ’em." "Well, there are plenty of other things to disillusion you. I adore onions." "So do I," he said. They laughed together. She was near enough for him to be aware of the faint scent of her breath, or it may have been a fragrance from her gown which stirred slightly in the evening breeze, or the delicate fresh perfume of her hair and skin—something indefinable, some exquisite emanation of youth which had stolen subtly into his senses—something of her, and as distinctly and inviolably hers as the occult atmosphere of a virgin planet. "Cousin," she said, "I thought we were to remove our masks in the family circle. They seem to be on as closely as ever." He looked at her a moment. "We never will remove them," he said. "Never?" "Never, Japonette." "Why not?" "Because, for example, in my case I want you to believe me everything I’d like to be. I know what I am. All people know what they are.... Does anybody ever really unmask? ... Could they if they wished to? There would be only another mask beneath.... We can’t ever get rid of masks.... I don’t care how hard we try, how honestly we try, how intimate two people become, how deeply they may love—there’s always a mask, and it grows there; and our own eyes are the slits. Even a mother with her first born in her arms looks down into its eyes in vain—those blue and transparent veils of a secret soul which sits behind them, impenetrable, inviolable." After a silence she said: "Silvette was right; you are a poet, Jim.... How dusky it is growing over the river. Silvette is probably superintending dinner preparations. Shall we go down?" *CHAPTER V* *DE MOTU PROPRIO* They arrived at Adriutha two days later in a roaring downpour of June rain. A maid conducted Silvette and Diana to their rooms, a valet piloted Edgerton to another wing of the house devoted to bachelors’ quarters over the vast billiard room. At the eastern end of the house Silvette stood beside the window while the maid assigned to them undressed her. Diana, already in her pajamas and sandals, lay flat on the bed, one knee crossed over, swinging her slim, bare foot and looking out at the rain. It was a wet outlook across the meadows, over a low range of rocky and wooded hills, behind which the invisible sun had already set. In the drenched foreground, beyond the meadow’s matted edge, the Deerfield River tossed and foamed, swollen a deeper amber by the rain—a wide, swift stream set with spray-dashed bowlders, and bordered alternately by ledges dripping with verdure and sandy stretches full of low rain-beaten willows. The world, through its limpid veil of rain, looked like a silvery aquarelle framed by a window.