Murder by Reflection Read Online Free Page B

on a side table. Still abstracted—for this fresh turn had now convinced her that he was not aiming at a sale—she took it and handed it to him.
    â€œOh, thank you for this loan.”
    He took it as abstractedly.
    â€œI’m glad it interested you,” he said perfunctorily, as though he had forgotten why he had offered it. He was still gazing at the small box and put the book beside him without looking at it. “That little moonlit scene—of course it’s quite unrealistic, but the convention is perfect, as perfect in its way as Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge at dawn. That, in fourteen formal lines, makes you feel that boundless hush which he felt a century ago on the Thames. And this hard little painting, as one looks through its small box-lid frame, it, too, is a magic casement opening not on fairy seas forlorn but on that same river which has flowed for centuries through such immortal verse.”
    A little rhetorical, she thought, but the Wordsworth and the Keats were brought in neatly enough. She could just, without moving her head, raise her eyes enough to watch his. Yes, they were fixed on the enamel miniature. She looked at it. It was lovely. He did love beautiful things and the past from which they came.
    â€œYes,” she spoke aloud. “I’d like, if I might, to study it, to ‘read’ it for the fortnight. Then perhaps it will tell me something of the beauty it has conveyed to you.”
    They had tea and he talked of these prized Battersea enamels, of a second-rate one he had himself, but always his eyes wandered to the perfect example itself. And, when he left, his last look was at it. She remembered, when he had gone, that he had said he would call again for it in two weeks.
    From that time on—she no longer hid it from herself—it was friendship, yes, and a sort of trust. She knew well enough that friendship and trust are not the same thing. You can have plenty of friends—because you like them—whom you don’t strain with trust; and your trustees are not infrequently (good, conscientious persons) not among your friends. A steel girder is always the better for being in the background, where it has an invaluable service to fulfill, but its very capacity and unbending strength make it unsuited for more casual and softer contacts. You like your friends to have a little give, even a little weakness, about them. But as far as their friendship went, Irene Ibis couldn’t doubt that she had also a slight sense of trust in Arnoldo Signorli. He seemed sincere about beauty, and though she was not such a fool as to imagine herself a belle, she felt now fairly sure that he honestly liked to have a place where he could come and be among beautiful things; talk of the beauty he had seen; and—as with the Battersea-enamel box—bring around a small fragment of artificial loveliness in order to appreciate it in another’s company.
    And this sincerity about beauty made him, she felt sure, want to go on with their friendship and so be quietly determined to keep it quiet. The fortnightly club-at-homes, one by one, assured her that Mrs. Maligni was being kept in ignorance now. Once she mentioned her nephew in regard to some art criticism that had arisen and remarked that she had not seen him for “an age.” He had told her that he was going away on business for some time. Miss Ibis had better knowledge.
    They met with this unspoken intimacy between them. Unspoken pacts grow quickest. They found, as is common, that once they had learned the language of allusion, they could speak more quickly and far more frankly than in direct words. They would look at a piece of silver—they had managed several museum visits, not only to the Metropolitan—and while studying it, they could (or she could, and she thought he did) each think about the other. And their remarks about art could be edged and fringed with references to each