The suggestion irritated him, because behind it he suspected a polite fear on Rhoda's part that he was chafing at the lack of some pagan joy or other that he might, on the quiet, recapture at a stage door. How make Rhoda understand, without offending her by venturing on such topics, that nothing on earth tempted him so little as that thought!
She had never referred, even by a hint, to the love affair he had half confessed to her, in vague iridiscent phrases. Yet it was always there between them, on the breakfast table, at dinner, when he played the piano, when they walked along the wintry beach with half a dozen dogs at their feet. In Rhoda's mind was doubtless the image of a gay abode of love, something excessively French, like the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne,—young Mr. Thanet all tangled up on a divan with a nymph who smelt of chypre and had corduroy colored hair. For "corduroy," Grover reflected, with his morbidly accurate intuition, would have stuck; to her dying day Rhoda would not forget that touch. And he bitterly thought of the morning at Maisons Lafitte when he had returned to sit on the edge of the bed technically allotted to him in Noémi Janvier's tolerant house, spent and cold, the savage appeased and contemptuous, Into Noémi's house he had brought a flame that had been fanned during a long year, with which to consume his last romantic illusion. Olga, like his other hopes and aspirations, had gone stale through waiting. For as he had sat
