CHAPTER XXIII

MORE TALK BETWEEN YOUNG MODERNS

When they met at dinner, they laughed outright at the sight of one another, a merry and shadowless laugh.  For an instant they looked like light-hearted children.  The change of Arnold’s long sallow face was indeed so noticeable that Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced sharply at him, and then looked again with great satisfaction.  She leaned to Sylvia and laid her charming white hand affectionately over the girl’s slim, strong, tanned fingers.  “It’s just a joy to have you here, my dear.  You’re brightening us stupid, bored people like fresh west wind!” She went on addressing herself to the usual guest of the evening:  “Isn’t it always the most beautiful sight, Felix, how the mere presence of radiant youth can transform the whole atmosphere of life!”

“I hadn’t noticed that my radiant youth had transformed much,” commented Arnold dryly; “and Sylvia’s only a year younger than I.”

He was, as usual, disregarded by the course of the conversation.  “Yes, sunshine in a shady place ...” quoted Morrison, in his fine mellow tenor, looking at Sylvia.  It was a wonderful voice, used with discretion, with a fine instinct for moderation which would have kept the haunting beauty of its intonations from seeming objectionable or florid to any but American ears.  In spite of the invariable good taste with which it was used, American men, accustomed to the toneless speech of the race, and jealously suspicious of anything approaching art in everyday life, distrusted Morrison at the first sound of his voice.  Men who were his friends (and they were many) were in the habit of rather apologizing for those rich and harmonious accents.  The first time she had heard it, Sylvia had thought of the G string of old Reinhardt’s violin.

“I never in my life saw anything that looked less like a shady place,” observed Sylvia, indicating with an admiring gesture the table before them, gleaming and flashing its glass and silver and close-textured, glossy damask up into the light.

“It’s morally that we’re so shady!” said Arnold, admiring his own wit so much that he could not refrain from adding, “Not so bad, what?” The usual conversation at his stepmother’s table was, as he would have said, so pestilentially high-brow that he seldom troubled himself to follow it enough to join in.  Arnold was in the habit of dubbing “high-brow” anything bearing on aesthetics; and Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates of years’ standing was for the most part reduced to a primitive simplicity for which a sign-language would have sufficed.  Arnold’s phrase for the situation was, “I let Madrina alone, and she don’t bother me.”  But now, seeing that neither the facade of Rouen, nor the influence of Chardin on Whistler, had been mentioned,