Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/263

 little fire of cedar wood had been lighted, more for its social fragrance than from any need of it. Soon we heard a pleasant chatter of "seasons" and "green dragons" and "characters."

It was a pleasant picture, as we looked in on it through the archway. We stood there together for a moment, her shoulder just brushing my sleeve, and we seemed both to be studying the scene, like—I sentimentalized it long afterward—like a pair of happy parents fondly watching their children at play. We seemed both to be thinking of the same thing; but I know that we were not; for I myself was thinking what a wonderful chatelaine Cornelia was, and what elaborate properties she really required for the adequate staging of her part in life, and what an unutterable fool any poor professor would be who should think that, if he picked up that little exquisite body by my side, he could carry off Cornelia, and make her his own. What I loved in her, I said to myself in a kind of bittersweet paroxysm of realization, was paradoxically not in her; it was the charming world which she had the gift of creating around her; and it would require a caravan of elephants to provide her with suitable accessories for the lodging of a single night.