Kitabı oku: «The Monster», sayfa 8
XII
At the glass door, which a chasseur opened, Barouffski stopped, spoke to the man, gave him an order. As the others, conducted by a maître d’hôtel, approached a table, a fat woman in a pulpit charged them, before they were seated, with the use of the silver and the cloth.
Beyond, a band of Bohemians, costumed in crimson, were loosing, with nervous and dirty fingers, whirlwinds of notes. The atmosphere, filled with vibrations, fevered by the fury of the violins, dripped with the scent of flowers, with the bouquet of burgundies, the smell of champagne, the odour of tobacco and food.
At adjacent tables were demi-reps and foreigners, mondaines and clubmen, a sprinkle of the cream of the venal, the exotic and the ultra-chic, whom omnibuses and waiters, marshaled by maîtres d’hôtel, served with the same deference and zeal.
For the Barouffski party, these latter had turned two tables into one, at which Violet Silverstairs occupied one end, Leilah the other. Violet had Barouffski at her right, Tempest at her left, while Leilah had Silverstairs at her left and d’Arcy at her right, a disposition natural enough and otherwise fortuitous which placed Tempest next to d’Arcy, with Barouffski and Silverstairs opposite.
In the rising storm of the music, Leilah turned to d’Arcy. What she was saying the others could not hear and all, save Silverstairs, who was munching a hors d’œuvre, addressed themselves to Violet.
Presently, in a lull of the gale, Tempest would have tried to talk to this woman who, in abandoning her Madonna air had now the merit of suggesting both the Chimera and the Sphinx, but something in her attitude to d’Arcy prevented. It was not, to employ a vulgarism, that she was making eyes at the man, but she was obviously permitting him to make eyes at her.
D’Arcy was seated, his arms on the table, talking in her face. His plate was empty. A chaudfroid had been served. He had refused it. A mousse had followed. He had refused that also. Over the glasses at his side he had put a hand. It seemed a pose of his not to eat or to drink that he might do nothing but talk.
Leilah herself had not eaten. But as soon as champagne was served she had drunk of it, she had drunk since and in her manner, in the way she held herself, in the inflection of her voice, there had entered a trace of the excessive which the mondaine avoids. It was this that had deterred Tempest. Moreover she had been laughing and that surprised Violet who, except a little earlier in the rotunda, never, since Leilah reached Paris, had seen her laugh before.
Now, her head drawn back, her eyes half closed, she was gratifying d’Arcy with that look with which a woman can appear not to listen merely but to drink the words, the appearance even, of the man by whom she is addressed. While perhaps flattering to him, it was too marked for good taste. The others noticed it, but, as is usual in such circumstances, they acted as though they had not.
Barouffski conscious of the impression produced, conscious also of the impressions of the afternoon, leaned forward and said in French:
“But, my dear! You eat nothing!”
Silverstairs, tugging at his moustache, laughed inanely and addressing himself to both Leilah and d’Arcy, threw in:
“If this is a private conversation – ”
“What nonsense!” Leilah threw back.
“I was about to say,” Silverstairs resumed, “that if it is a private conversation, I’d like to hear it. If it is not, never mind.”
Barouffski, still leaning forward, continued:
“I pray you take a bit of the chaudfroid.”
With a movement of impatience, yet otherwise ignoring him completely, Leilah turned again to d’Arcy.
Barouffski was not in a mood to be ignored. The sight of d’Arcy in the afternoon, the man’s unawaited advent at the Opéra, his demeanour to Leilah, her attitude to him, the hazards which both seemed to suggest; yet chiefly the precariousness of his own position, the constant effort to appear other than what he was, the consciousness of danger ever present, the obligation to cover irritation with calm, anxiety with banter, these things and the tension of them, fevered and enraged. At the moment he felt like a fiend and looked it. A moment only. Reacting at once, he compressed his lips, parted them and summoning his ambiguous smile, called out:
“If the chaudfroid says nothing to you, will you not try the mousse?”
Leilah was raising a glass to her lips. She looked over it at him and, much as though he were a servant, said:
“Do me the favour to attend to your own affairs.”
Barouffski’s smile evaporated. A man with no sense of honour and some sense of humour may go far, provided that he keep his temper. Barouffski knew it but forgot it. With a tone of authority which in the rue de la Pompe he would have ordinarily avoided, angrily he replied:
“Then do me the favour not to drink any more.”
Leilah, the glass at her lips, paused, looked over it again, and very gently, almost sweetly, with the pretty air of a spoiled child, nodded at him.
“Only one sip.”
She touched the glass with her lips, for a moment held it there, then, offering it to d’Arcy, rather languorously she said:
“Beau sire, will you drink the rest?”
Instantly Violet intervened. “Leilah! Behave yourself!”
“But with delight,” d’Arcy was saying.
From Leilah’s extended hand he took the glass, raised it, drained it, put it down, looked at her.
Barouffski was looking at him. Quietly, without emphasis, he asked:
“Will you drink mine, too?”
Half rising as he spoke, he had taken his own glass in his hand and with a gesture which, even as he made it, he regretted, a gesture incited by vibrations which he was unable to resist, he flung the contents at him.
“Barouffski!” Violet indignantly exclaimed.
She glanced about her. At her elbow an omnibus, a lad undersized but stout, stood gaping. Beyond, the Bohemians were storming. At the adjacent table were demi-reps and South Americans. They had not noticed. At this table, Tempest, his teeth visible, was contemplating his host. Silverstairs, tugging at his moustache, was considering Leilah. The latter was looking – and with what a look! – at Barouffski. But no one spoke. A spell seemed to have settled on all. With the idea of doing or of saying something that would break it, Violet turned to d’Arcy.
Delicately, with a coroneted handkerchief, he had wiped his face and was then mopping at his shirt.
Interrupting the operation, he looked up and laughed. “Oh, la, la! The dangers that may be avoided in remaining at home! These are the accidents of restaurant life!”
He laughed again. The laugh humanised and deformed the Pheidian beauty of his face. He bowed to Leilah, bowed to Violet and collectively added:
“Mesdames, I have ceased to be presentable. A thousand pardons. You will permit me?”
In a moment, after another bow, circular this time, a bow which while managing to omit Barouffski, included the rest of the table, he had gone.
“He looks like Keats,” said Silverstairs animated by an unconscious desire to second his wife and break the spell which still persisted. Ordinarily he would have taken her and gone. The assault had been as much of an affront to her as it had been to d’Arcy. But to have left the table would have been a reproof to Leilah, whom, in the ridiculous way in which society is organized, he was unable to disassociate from Barouffski.
“Keats!” Tempest, coming to his aid, exclaimed. “I’ll lay a guinea you would not know his picture if you saw it.”
Amiably Silverstairs tugged at his moustache. “Well, perhaps not. What I meant was that he looks like a poet.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Tempest retorted. “To begin with, there are not any. Besides, latterly there have been but two – Hugo, who looked like a green-grocer, and Swinburne who looked like a bookseller’s assistant. Moreover I hate poets, though, as someone said somewhere, an inability to write in verse can hardly be regarded as constituting a special talent. No, d’Arcy does not look like a poet, he looks like a poet’s creation.”
“Excuse me,” Silverstairs with affected meekness threw out. “And thanks for the lecture.”
Tempest nodded. “You’re entirely welcome.”
He turned to Violet. She was looking at Leilah who was looking at Barouffski. The latter was looking at the fingers of his right hand against which his thumb passed and repassed mechanically. But now, aroused from his reflections by the entire cessation of talk, he glanced about him, summoned a waiter, settled the score. The Bohemians who momentarily had been silent, abruptly striped the air with spangles from their bows.
Violet and Leilah stood up, resumed their wraps, passed on. The men, buttoning their coats, putting their gloves on, followed.
At the door were the eager grooms. As one of them touched his hat to Leilah, Violet turned to her.
“My dear, I cannot thank you for a very pleasant evening. But I will look in on you to-morrow. That bone isn’t picked and what’s more, now I’ve got sauce for it.”
With Silverstairs and Tempest at her heels, she went to her brougham. Leilah entered the motor.
At the door of the latter Barouffski stood. He raised his hat. Leilah looked at him. She had had, she thought, her last glimpse of the world and this was her last glimpse of him. The sight was so repugnant that she almost sickened and the nausea which she felt, her face expressed.
Barouffski tried to smile but the unconcealed candour of her abhorrence made his lips twitch. Now, though, the motor was starting. As it whirred away, he drew his coat closely about him, turned up the collar and stuck his hands deep in the pockets. There had come to him that odd sensation which homely fancy attributes to someone walking on your grave.
XIII
The next day, Violet, entering the brilliant room, gazed first about it and then at Leilah.
“Aurelia is not here? That’s odd. She is simply horrid but so reliable. You don’t mind my having told her to meet me?”
Leilah sighed. “I am getting so that soon I shan’t mind anything.”
Violet, seating herself, nodded vivaciously.
“I call that very fine. But there is something finer. Never mind anybody. Silverstairs now – ” and as the lady spoke she summoned a smile feline and Cheshire – “he fancied I would be a good, obedient little wife. Instead of which he is a good, obedient big husband.” In entire self-appreciation she exhibited the tip of her tongue and moistened her lips with it. “It takes us, doesn’t it? But forgive me, dear, us is perhaps an exaggeration. I am afraid you have made rather a mess of things. Now what are you going to do?”
Without replying, Leilah looked away. During the night she had barely slept. The incident in the restaurant, events that had preceded it, anterior complications, subsequent developments, these things, like the Bohemians at Paillard’s, had stormed at her, attacked her fibres, wrenched her nerves, striating the darkness of her room with variations on the tragedy of her life.
In what manner the affair in the restaurant had terminated, she had no one to inform her but she could readily fancy that shortly d’Arcy and Barouffski would go somewhere and fight, or pretend to, and then return, none the worse and none the better, but with honour satisfied and their names in print.
The entire episode was shameful. But though provoked by her she had not premeditated it. In offering d’Arcy her glass, she had wished solely to display her independence. Subsequently, in going over the matter, she had realised that the wish, while human, had not been nice. Then, a bit conscience-stricken, she had wondered how she could have behaved as she had.
“I did it without thinking,” was her immediate excuse. But that, she told herself was untrue. Ever since the duel and the blow and the nightmare that followed, some such wish had been fermenting in her. The wish, reasonable in itself, though in her case unreasoned, persisted, as in certain natures a wish will persist, until, after the fashion of a constantly recurring idea, the individual becomes so saturated with it that, given the impulse, given less than that, given a vibration, some effect, perhaps wholly atmospheric, and suddenly the idea has solidified into an act, an act noble, degrading or merely banal, according to the influence that produced it, but an act which, whatever its character, has then become inevitable, even involuntary, its constant mental recurrence having exhausted the ability to choose between it and another.
Leilah had thought of this and, in search of comfort, had groped for another excuse. As an Oriental will say: “My body is tired.” “My body is hungry,” so Leilah decided: “It was my nerves that did it.”
But the sophistry displeased her. She knew that she had judged and condemned Barouffski and she knew also that she had no right to do either. The man was clearly a cad, a scoundrel and a brute, yet even though he were these things and worse and more besides, he so became in her eyes merely because her consciousness had evolved to a point higher than his own. Seen from a different angle, she might appear only a shade less reprehensible, and it might be, even equally vile. Moreover, according to the Upanishads, this consciousness of hers and that consciousness of his were fundamentally one. Both had come from the same source. To that source both would ultimately return. They would be fused there, as originally there they had been merged.
At the apperception of that, the curious lines which occur in the Book of Dzyan suggested themselves:
“Said the Flame to the Spark: ‘I have clothed myself in thee, thou art my image, my body, until that day when thou shalt rebecome myself and others, thyself and me.’”
In the penetrating beauty of the allegory Leilah told herself that she, Barouffski, Verplank, the Silverstairs, the Helley-Quetgens, everybody whom she knew, everyone whom she did not know, all the fillers of space, were sparks of one Flame, the Flame from which they had been formerly emitted and into which they would finally return. That, she felt she must believe, if she were to believe anything. But she felt too that though she did believe it, she believed also that for the present there were sparks better parted than united, as there were also others better united than apart.
On the table before her was a treatise on the Paramitas – which are The Blessed Things. She looked at it, knowing that what she had done was wrong and what she was about to do was evil. But she felt also that she could not help herself. Whatever the penalty, it was impossible for her to live with Barouffski. Whatever the punishment, it was impossible for her not to live with Verplank. At the moment it seemed to her as though the high fates had set her in a circle from which she could not escape except by the door of death or that of further sinning. At this idea she wondered about Barouffski as, after Verplank’s eruption at the Joyeuses, she had wondered about him. She wondered whether in some former existence she had injured Barouffski and whether it were for that reason that she had been led into giving him the power to injure her now. It might be so, she told herself, in which case she ought to bear it. But how could she know that it was so? Yet even though it were and the fact were made clear to her, even then, even too if the certainty of a punishment more poignant than any were shaken in her eyes, still she could not bear it.
“But I ought to,” she found herself saying.
These reflections Violet’s advent had interrupted.
“What are you going to do?” the lady was asking.
Leilah, unfit at the moment for battle, felt unable to tell. She looked away.
“Nothing, I suppose.”
Violet, cocking a belligerent eye, threw out:
“You carry moderation to excess.”
Leilah looked up. “What would you have me do?”
“Divorce Barouffski.”
“Because he threw champagne about? I hardly fancy I could get a divorce for that.”
Militantly Violet whipped off a glove. “Frankly that creature is a criminal. Never, in all my life, have I seen such an exhibition of bad taste. But then, as they say here, bad taste leads to crime – to such vulgar forms of it at that.”
“Even so, I don’t see how it helps me.”
“But he struck you,” Violet, more bellicose than ever, exclaimed. “You told me so. What more would you have. But aren’t you difficile to-day!” Suspiciously she considered her friend. “You’ve got something up your sleeve.”
“If I have,” Leilah, in an effort to parry the thrust, replied, “at least it is not witnesses.”
Cogently Violet nodded. “Come to me then. Divorce is the mother-in-law of invention. If you haven’t any witnesses, I’ll find something else. I make a specialty of finding things before they are lost.”
This programme hardly suited Leilah’s book. Again she parried. “Last night – and what a night! – I dreamed I was feasting with the dead. It was so peaceful. It is that that I want. It is peace the very fibres of my being crave.”
Here were heights – or depths – where Violet could not follow. With a smile she tacked.
“Before you dreamed your dream I noticed that you wore a very ducky frock.”
“It is stained. So am I. The champagne Barouffski threw stained me within and without.”
Here were other heights. Readily Violet skirted them.
“I believe I got a drop or two myself. But then I don’t mind. It is true I am not a theosophist.”
At this, in indignation at herself, Leilah protested.
“Theosophy is primarily a school of good manners. In giving d’Arcy my glass, mine were detestable.”
Now they were on surer ground. Wickedly Violet winked.
“Nobody has any manners any more or, when they do, they have them in plenty and all of them bad.”
“If I have an excuse,” Leilah continued, “it is that Gulian drove me nearly demented.”
Now, Violet felt, they were getting at it. Mentally she girded herself and with an engaging appearance of sympathy, exclaimed:
“A man never does that unless he loves a woman to distraction.”
The sympathy, however feigned, did its work. After all, Leilah reflected, why should she not tell what she was about to do? On the impulse she turned.
“Violet, I offered Barouffski half my fortune to free me. His reply was a blow. Apart from that I have no grounds for a divorce, none at least which I can show. Previously there was something between Gulian and me. It has gone. He cares for me still and I care for him. Shortly he is to be here. For a long time I hesitated. But after last night – after the nights and days that preceded it! – it does not seem to me that I need hesitate any more.”
Pausing, she drew breath. “Violet, when he comes I am to go with him. Is there a reason why I should not?”
Violet, who had long suspected as much, now at last had nailed it. Cautiously she buckled to.
“No. Not one. On the contrary. There is every reason why you should. Every reason. Particularly as to greet you there will be the disdainful eyes, the lifted skirts, the averted heads, every one of the very slight and very fiendish tortures that are visited on the woman who has gone and done it.”
For a second she too paused, then with a war whoop added:
“But you can’t do anything of the kind. I won’t let you.”
“Would you turn from me also?”
“I! Merciful fathers! But I am not the world. No matter what is done in private, the world does not care. The world is very well bred. It never sees anything that was not intended for it. But on the open scandal of scandalous conduct instantly it turns its well bred back. It will turn it on you.”
Indifferently Leilah assented. She had examined this phase of the matter. It had not seemed very important.
“No doubt,” she replied. “Yet then destiny seldom closes a door without opening another. I told you of my dream. It was a dream of peace. Here there can be none. It may be my karma perhaps. But this,” she continued, motioning at the brilliant room, “this is my prison.”
She hesitated and a bit lamely concluded:
“It is horrible to be in such a place.”
“And worse to be nowhere at all,” Violet shot at her. In firing she had sat up. Now, lolling back on the cushions, she enigmatically resumed: “You may be right though. I daresay it is dreadful to be in prison. I daresay it is even worse than you think.”
Enigmatic still, she smiled. With another shot, with two at most, Leilah, she told herself, would be routed.
“It is as though I were in a vortex,” the latter was saying. “It is as though I were being torn from places where I do not wish to be to others I may not like. But can one argue with a vortex? It is idle even to struggle. Whether you will or you won’t, you have to let yourself go.”
Lightly, in her most worldly manner, Violet laughed.
“Never in the world! A woman should never let herself go – except in an aeroplane. At a pinch a four-in-hand might do, but – ”
At the moment the lady was thoroughly en veine and, sure of victory, might have bantered on, but this, Aurelia, ushered by Parker, prevented.
Sharply Violet threw at her: “Where have you been?”
Ignoring Violet, Aurelia nodded at Leilah.
“I was here the other day, did they tell you?”
She turned and with blithe impertinence looked her sister up and down.
“Don’t be so ordinary as to ask a girl where she has been. If you are inquisitive, ask where she is going, and, if you ask me, I’ll tell you. I am going to become – ”
“Yes, yes.” Violet impatiently interrupted. “We’ve heard all that. You’re going to become a star. I know what kind too – a fallen star.”
A fresher smile bubbled about Aurelia’s delicious mouth.
“It pleases your ladyship to jest. I am to become the Princess Farnese!”
“Merciful heavens!” Violet exclaimed, turning as she spoke to Leilah. “She’ll go in to dinner before me!”
But Leilah who, after a word of greeting to Aurelia, had, from the table before her, taken and reopened the Paramitas, perhaps did not hear.
Violet turned again to her sister. “When did he propose?”
With an air of amused contempt, again Aurelia looked her up and down.
“How antiquated you are! Don’t you know that all that sort of thing has gone out?”
“Do you mean that he didn’t propose?”
“Of course not. I proposed to him.”
“What?”
“He was so coy about it, too,” Aurelia, quite as though she were eating sweetmeats, resumed. “He asked me all about my finances, what settlements I would make and whether I would object if he kept a separate establishment. You can’t really fancy how coy he was. He quite blushed and stammered, the poor thing.”
“I should think he might.”
“Yes, indeed. He asked me if I had spoken to his mamma, and I told him that while it was perhaps incorrect of me to speak to him in the first instance, yet that there could be no real love without a mutual misunderstanding, and now that we had one I would make a formal demand of the old lady to-day.”
Aurelia, executing a little pas, added: “I have just seen her.”
“Well?”
“She said: ‘And so you want my little boy for your husband.’ Partly that I told her, but partly also I want you for mother-in-law. You should have seen her lick her chops over that. Then she asked me about my affections. I told her they were just like the fashions. They came and went.”
“She must have been delighted.”
“She hugged me. Then, of course, I asked about him. She told me that he has just been named as co-respondent in the Kincardine divorce suit, and I said that that was perfectly satisfactory.”
“What!”
“Perfectly satisfactory. It appears that the poor boy can’t remember whether the charge is true or false and that I think is so dear of him.”
Violet, rising, extended her arms. “Aurelia, I have been wrong, I have misjudged you. Come to me.”
But Aurelia, moving back, waved her away. “You’ll only muss me. Now I must run. I must break the news to Parsnips. Will you come, Vi?”
“In a moment.” Violet answered. “Wait for me in the brougham. There is something I want to say to Leilah.”
Endearingly the ingénue smiled. “Something I ought not to hear, I suppose.” In speaking she made for the door. “The amount of things I ought not to hear and do hear is simply amazing.”
As the portières fell on her gracile back, Violet, with a gesture which, for so warlike a lady, resembled defeat, reseating herself, exclaimed:
“Frankly, she is impossible.”
At once though, buckling anew for the fray, she aimed at Leilah and fired.
“So are you.”
Leilah, who had been considering the Paramitas, started at the attack which instantly was followed up by another.
“Do you know anything about the code here, the law code, I mean. Do you?”
Leilah, a bit bewildered, shook her head. “No, that is, very little.”
Violet’s eyes fairly snapped. “I congratulate you. A little is sometimes a great deal. I also know a little and that little is, well, immense, so enormous even that because of it I am in a position to tell you that if you go with Verplank, Barouffski can, if he catches you, have you jailed.”
Gravely, with curious calm, Leilah looked at her.
Annoyed that the shot had fallen short, Violet aimed again.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said jailed. J-a-i-l-e-d! Now I may add for two years. That is what I meant when you spoke of your prison. I agreed with you that it must be dreadful to be in one. I said I daresay it is even worse than you think.”
Leilah half raised a hand. “But – ”
Unheedingly Violet continued. “Now, as for Verplank, if Barouffski were to surprise him here with you he could kill you both, yes, and be acquitted. But you – I have told you what he can do. Moreover, if he so much as suspects you, he can call the police. But excuse me. You were saying?”
“Nothing of any moment.”
But Violet persisted. “What was it?”
“Merely that during the Terror a woman went to the guillotine smelling a rose.”
At this flank movement Violet winced, but she rallied.
“Yes and rehearsed the act beforehand. They all did. The great ladies of the period rehearsed for the guillotine that they might die, as they had lived, with grace. Those were the good old days. These are the bad new ones. Anything of the kind would be ridiculous now.”
To this, gravely as before, Leilah assented. “No doubt. But aren’t you rather rambling about the grounds? It seems to me that you also have something up your sleeve.”
Violet rose to the challenge. “Something! I have the entire pharmacopœia. In it is a remedy heroic but sovereign. If you’ll take it, it may maim but it will cure.”
Leilah, well entrenched, braved her. “I may not need it.”
With a rush, then, the attack began.
“That’s because you don’t know. You think you are sane and sound. Don’t you now? Yes, and you are neither. You have a high temperature complicated with nausea. The temperature is due to exposure, the nausea to indigestion. You have been exposed to Verplank and you have supped on Barouffski. You fancy you can’t be rid of the incubus. That is an hallucination which the fever has caused. You can be rid of it. You can throw it up. I have an emetic that will do the trick. It may not be tasty but I’ll warrant it will make him gag far more than you.”
At the ferocity of the assault, Leilah quailed. “Really, Violet, your language – ”
But the lady was not to be denied. “Aha! You want me to be butter-fingered, don’t you? Not a bit of it. You shall have the dose whether you like it or not and here it is for you. You called this place a prison. Now who runs it? You do. And on what? Your money. Supposing you hadn’t any? Would Barouffski supply it? He would pack in a jiffy. Couldn’t you then sue for divorce? Of course you could. Then there is the emetic. Verplank has enough for you both, enough for an army. All you have to do is to hold your nose, open your mouth, give your money away and vomit Barouffski. Will you?”
It was Violet’s last shot. With it she had expected to bowl Leilah completely over. Anxiously she looked to see the result.
“Will you?” she repeated.
With manifest exaltation Leilah answered: “I had thought of it.”
Surprisedly Violet stared, wondering could all her ammunition have gone for nothing, wondering too at the almost rapt expression that had come into Leilah’s face.
“What?”
“Yes, Violet, I had thought of it – and of other things also. While Aurelia was here, I was reading a little book. It told me what I once knew and had since forgotten. It told me that if we have ideals we should live for them, that it is only by living for them and suffering for them that we can lift ourselves above the brutes. Violet, it was sinful of me to think of going with Gulian.”
Dispassionately the now mollified lady toned that phrase.
“It was not perhaps quite nice.”
“But I had not seen,” Leilah continued. “No, not that,” she interrupted herself to explain. “I had forgotten that this prison, all I have endured, all I shall endure, these are my debts to the Lords of Karma.”
But that was a bit too strong. Violet laughed.
“You mean the Lords of Gammon.”
“I mean,” Leilah, with heightening fervour, replied, “that I have looked upon my prison as a cross. It is not a cross, it is a boon – one of which I have not been worthy. For I forgot that any sorrow should be welcomed. I forgot that it has been sent to make us nobler than we are. But my sorrows I have not welcomed. I have rebelled against them. I shall rebel no more. They were my masters. They shall be my servants now.”
At these fine sentiments Violet sniffed.
“If that is theosophy I will believe in it when I am old, fat and a German. But I am glad it enabled you to reach a decision. Otherwise – ”
But what the lady may have intended to say was never expressed or at least not then. Through the yellow portières, the delicate oval of Aurelia’s face appeared.
“Aren’t you ever coming?” she called. “What have you two been talking about?”
As the ingénue spoke, she entered, strolled to the mirror, considered herself.
“We have been discussing your engagement,” Violet, in a very matter of fact way, replied.
Aurelia adjusted her hat, patted her hair, and addressed the mirror.
“I fancied it must be something important. Did I tell you what happened before I took Farnese?”
Violet yawned. “I have forgotten.”
Aurelia, still pluming herself, smiled.
“Then I didn’t. Besides, it is so shocking.”
Violet motioned at her. “Don’t be tiresome. I may have lost the ability to be shocked but not the ability to be bored.”
