Yes, I'm strong."
"You'll need it."
"I have needed it," said she. Into her face came the sad, bitter
expression with its curious relief of a faint cynical smile.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at her through a cloud
of smoke. She saw that his eyes were not gray, as she had
thought, but brown, a hazel brown with points of light
sparkling in the irises and taking away all the suggestion of
weakness and sentimentality that makes pure brown eyes
unsatisfactory in a man. He said slowly:
"When I saw you--in the Martin--you were on the way down. You
went, I see."
She nodded. "I'm still there."
"You like it? You wish to stay?"
She shook her head smilingly. "No, but I can stay if it's
necessary. I've discovered that I've got the health and the
nerves for anything."
"That's a great discovery. . . . Well, you'll soon be on your
way up. . . . Do you wish to know why I spoke to you this
morning?--Why I remembered you?"
"Why?"
"Because of the expression of your eyes--when your face is in repose."
She felt no shyness--and no sense of necessity of responding
to a compliment, for his tone forbade any thought of flattery.
She lowered her gaze to conceal the thoughts his words
brought--the memories of the things that had caused her eyes
to look as Rod and now Brent said.
"Such an expression," the playwright went on, "must mean
character. I am sick and tired of the vanity of these
actresses who can act just enough never to be able to learn to
act well.
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