Page:Oppenheim--The cinema murder.djvu/140

130 work, I saw the people moving around me, and I knew that I had made my dreams real, and that's the great thing, isn't it? … Elizabeth!"

"Well?"

"I am lonely in that little room."

"You lonely, taking out typewriters to dine!" she mocked tenderly.

"It is lonely," he repeated, "and I am afraid of you here in all this luxury. I am so far away. I come from my attic to this, and I am afraid. Do you know why?"

She sat quite still for a moment. Dimly she felt the presage of a coming change in their relations. Up to now she had been the mistress, she had held him so easily in check with her practised skill, with an unfinished sentence, a look, a touch. And now the man was rising up in him, and she felt her powers weaken.

"Shall I change my abode?" she murmured.

"Ah! but you would be just as wonderful and as far away even if we changed places—if you sat in my attic and I took your place here. That isn't why I torture myself, why I am always asking myself if you are real, if the things we talk about are real, if the things we feel belong to ourselves, well up from our own hearts for one another or are just the secondary emotions of other people we catch up without knowing why. This is foolish, but you understand—you do understand. It is because you keep me so far away from yourself, when my fingers are burning for yours, when even to touch your face, to feel your cheek against mine, would banish every fear I have ever had. Elizabeth, you do understand!