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surprised when he fell in love with a conservative and rather proper
girl.
Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from
somewhere in California. Her family kept a winter residence just
outside of town, and in spite of her primness she was enormously
popular; there is a large class of men whose egotism can't endure
humor in a woman. But Anson wasn't that sort, and I couldn't
understand the attraction of her "sincerity" – that was the thing to say
about her – for his keen and somewhat sardonic mind.
Nevertheless, they fell in love – and on her terms. He no longer
joined the twilight gathering at the De Soto bar, and whenever they
were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue,
which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me
that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on both
sides of immature and even meaningless statements – the emotional
content that gradually came to fill it grew up not out of the words but
out of its enormous seriousness. It was a sort of hypnosis. Often it
was interrupted, giving way to that emasculated humor we call fun;
when they were alone it was resumed again, solemn, low-keyed, and
pitched so as to give each other a sense of unity in feeling and
thought. They came to resent any interruptions of it, to be
unresponsive to facetiousness about life, even to the mild cynicism of
their contemporaries. They were only happy when the dialogue was
going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the amber glow of an
open fire. Toward the end there came an interruption they did not
resent – it began to be interrupted by passion.
Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she
was and as profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that
on his side much was insincere, and on hers much was merely simple.
At first, too, he despised her emotional simplicity as well, but with his
love her nature deepened and blossomed, and he could despise it no
longer. He felt that if he could enter into Paula's warm safe life he
would be happy. The long preparation of the dialogue removed any
constraint – he taught her some of what he had learned from more
adventurous women, and she responded with a rapt holy intensity.
One evening after a dance they agreed to marry, and he wrote a long
letter about her to his mother. The next day Paula told him that she
was rich, that she had a personal fortune of nearly a million dollars.