Murder by Reflection by H. F. Heard Page B

feeling. She felt there was no need for us to meet just because we are both out here and feel a little stranded, when back in the East she would not feel that she had to ask me to her house.”
    He protested that his mother was tired, not very well, and had become something of a recluse. But he knew, and Miss Gayton knew, that henceforth it was pretty certain that they would have to meet, if they met at all, unofficially, if not clandestinely. Miss Gayton, too, was frank about her feelings. She told him—and this surprised him more than a little—that she didn’t like the house.
    â€œI’ve no doubt it’s in perfect taste but it’s really too perfectly done. I suppose that’s again my New England conscience which dreads not only all extravagance but perhaps even more …” She paused for a word, or rather, to examine the word which she had intended to use. Then she decided she had better say it. “Any sort of acting. The house with Mrs. Heron seated in it in formal state, gives me an uncanny sense of a theater stage-scene set for some play that is about to begin. The lights will go out and all that will be visible, the only persons visible, will be the costumed actors playing out a plot. Today will have disappeared. And I can’t help feeling that not only is it a piece of make-believe that is being performed but that it is somehow an uncanny drama that is staged. I know that sounds, in itself, a bit theatrical. But I think I’d better say what I feel.”
    Her remark stirred the conflict in his mind, and he was not sorry that of his two lives, the one with this new friend and the one with his mother, the one should be completely out of doors and the other in its chosen setting. He realized that he had always known that Irene would never let him have another woman friend. Just because their relationship had been platonic, parental-filial, all the more would she be suspicious of any other friendship. Secrecy has this disadvantage, however, at least for those who like a quiet life—it heightens excitement and makes, like hide-and-seek, the most ordinary passerby someone to be shunned. Arnoldo had tried to avoid Doc the mailman. Trying to avoid a public person made him feel that he was doing something guilty; feeling the sense of guilt moved him to find an inner reason for the outer reaction. Miss Gayton began to seem not a quiet relaxation, a gently affectionate relationship, but a romance. Once that happened the days of quiet, casual conversation were numbered.
    She was far too intelligent not to sense the change and far too lonely not to wish not to notice it. She carefully avoided mentioning Mrs. Heron again. They stuck to natural history; but, as he had found in his silver-reflective intimacies with Irene, now with Marian Gayton it was the same. They talked of the desert wild flowers and the successful struggle they made to carry out their inner wish to express beauty—of course they meant themselves. They speculated on why as some species of animals have aged they have become helpless and malignant—all snakes, he told her, had limbs until the close of the Eocene; no snake was poisonous before the Miocene—but they were not thinking of forty to sixty million years ago but of today.
    But “today” lasted for months—into another year; the wild flowers came again. Mrs. Heron was in better physical health.
    Dr. Hertz remarked, “I give you newcomers a year. The first couple of months you feel that you would like to sleep all day and wonder whether you haven’t lethargica encephalitis; the next quarter you’re out in rashes and queer little urticarias and we’re asking, ‘Do you know poison oak when you see it, or are you allergic to limes?’ The next half-year you can run a pretty little scale of undulant fever, and we question the milkman (though of course he’s safe), and then wonder whether a Rocky Mountain tick could