He found her standing in a little study he had not seen before. The maid shut the door behind him. A clouded room in which two lamps pendant with gray silk shades cast a languid light. Herself within it. They were somehow close, wherever they stood in the thick room. She wore a straight and filmy housegown of lavender caught loosely back over her narrow hips by a golden girdle. The braided cord fell loose and heavy in front. The room was a place where glowed her gowned body. David was conscious how he was placeless within it. She took away her hand at once, sat down. She left him to find a seat. She had said nothing. He could see her teeth and how she was faintly smiling, and that her teeth were cutting white against the cloud of her skin. Her shoulders were sharp and dear in the faint stuff of her gown. He could have said to himself: “She has _on_ that gown. It is not she.” Her shoulders were articulate with little movements saying as much. Her arms came full from the folds of her drooping half-sleeves: her arms denied in their luxuriance the terse cut of her shoulders. She left words to David. She did not help him find them. David took long selecting a place to sit. He took a chair and moved it and moved it again. He had to be in the right place for sitting: for talking, also. She watched him, with an uncertain pleasure whose suggestion helped him since there was no hint he should hurry. “It was very impetuous of me, I guess, to want to see you all of a sudden.” “You see how much I mind.... Then before to-night you did not want to see me?” “Did I say that?” “I think so.” “I did not, somehow, think of coming.” “Is that the same thing?” David paused. “I think not. I think if I had never wanted to come before I could not so suddenly have wanted to, now.” “The wish burst out to the surface?” She seemed to be calmly annotating him. “That must be it,” David spoke pensively. “Then, you must answer me two questions.... Why didn’t you want to know before to-night, that you wanted to come? And what brought you to knowing at this particular time?” She was leaning back in her chair and smiling; it seemed to David she was leaning forward and with serious face. As if this had been the truth, he reacted. He found himself withdrawing: slightly chilled at himself as if he had done an extravagant thing. “Is there no such thing as a mere whim or mood?” Constance Bardale understood his reversal in a flash. The contest was on: his dull playing to her hands was over. For a moment she had feared he was going to be sentimental. She was afraid of emotional words as a priestess of a desecration at her altar. Here he was, struggling away. Her delight released the energy of movement. A peal of laughter, low like her words; a somewhat mental laughter: flush of roused energy which in a more serious contingence must have turned into flight or pursuit.