“Well, I _am_ a cat!” Cornelia grinned.
“Do you mean you can tell me things--?” It was too beautiful to believe.
“About what really _was?_” she artfully considered, holding him
immensely now. “Well, unless they’ve come to you with time; unless
you’ve learned--or found out.”
“Oh,” he reassuringly cried--reassuringly, it most seemed, for
himself--“nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me.
How can I find out now! What creature has an idea----?”
She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days--the sharp little
shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to
Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.
“Ah, the ideas of people now----!”
“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us” But he ruefully faced it.
“We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”
“With their ideas--?” Cornelia questioned.
“With _them_--these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on:
“It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”
She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his
photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of _her_.”
This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I _have_ one?”
She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long
net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up,
over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of
very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack--braided quite
plain and very broad, don’t you know?”
He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things--she was as
prompt as if she had had them before her. “Oh, rather--‘don’t I know?’
You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny
gauntlets--like mine.”
“Oh, do _you_ remember? But like yours?” she wondered.
“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present
picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”
“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.
“Yes--it was better than her heart.”
“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”
“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely--and the more
that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to
hope.
“She didn’t think so--to the very end.”
“She didn’t?”--ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she
could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. “No,
she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say
that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don’t know, I don’t
know!” White-Mason quite comfortably sighed.
His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. “That’s just the way
you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn’t you like to have it?”
she asked.
“This--for my very own?” He looked up delighted. “I really may?”
“Well, if you’ll give me yours. We’ll exchange.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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