"It is a beautiful morning. . . . Look at the dew shining beneath the hedge. And the spider webs like nets of shining silver."
Sometimes Schneidermann rode silently by her side, stealing glances at the color in her cheeks and the blue black of her hair as she rode so straight and so proud and yet so careless of her horse, reining him in at will or galloping him madly through the long tunnels under the dripping linden trees. He was a tall thin man with an arched nose and a blond drooping mustache, rather pale and mild, who never disputed with her the choice of bridle paths or the hour they were to return. She understood that he was interested in her; he had helped her with her accent, though in this they had made little progress, for she had a stubborn, careless way of sticking to her own version of the tongue just as she had never lost completely her way of saying "dawg" for dog and "watter" for water, and persisted in the burr which came to her doubly through a Scottish heritage and a middle-western childhood. She suspected sometimes that he might even be falling in love with her and this made her knit up her brows and scowl at him furtively. She did not want him, even with all his money. She had had one husband who was mild and gentle and a bit stupid. Schneidermann was, to be sure, more intelligent than Clarence, and he knew far more of the world; it amused her to talk with him of music and art and politics, but a relationship more intimate was to her inconceivable. Aside from this worldly knowledge he was like Clarence; he possessed the same humbleness, the same physical paleness. It annoyed her to believe that she attracted only men who must be dominated.
Yet there was Callendar. Unconsciously she came to compare the humbleness of Schneidermann and Clarence with the cat-like virility of Callendar. It was as if she were putting aside all other men in the knowledge that some day, at some time if she waited long enough, she would come to possess him. Yet when she thought of him, as she frequently did after she had gone up to the luxurious room looking out upon the white pavilion, she grew angry at the memory of that last visit to the Babylon Arms.
