“Darling, where have you been? I’ve been crazy with worry! How could you go out and meet that Nash boy so brazenly? Tonight of all nights!”
“It wasn’t David, Mother,” Sally said in a dead-tired voice. “It was Arthur Van Horne. He—knows—all about me. He’s known all along.”
Five weeks later—it was in early January, just before the annual scurrying of self-coddling society folk from the rigors of a New York winter to the sunshine of Palm Beach and Nassau—Sally Barr, “one of the season’s most beautiful debutantes,” as the society editors called her, sat at a table for six in one of New York’s most exclusive night clubs.
She was thankful for the fact that an inhumanly flexible male dancer was doing his most incredible tricks for the amusement of the club’s patrons, for watching him gave her an opportunity to think, an excuse for not chattering brightly as debutantes were expected to do.
Grant Proctor, whom Enid had hoped she would marry, sat opposite her, Arthur Van Horne on her right. Beside Grant, twittering and giggling, was Claire Bainbridge, whose engagement to the heir of the Proctor millions would be announced from Palm Beach.
And yet Sally was conscious that Grant’s nice, leaf-brown eyes followed her with a frustrated, doglike devotion whenever she was near him. He had told her that he loved her, and Sally, terribly anxious to please her mother and to secure Enid Barr’s safety from scandal, had been ready to listen to his proposal of marriage. Since David was lost to her, it did not much matter whom she married.
“But if he asks me to marry him, Mother, I’ll have to tell him the truth about my birth,” Sally had told Enid.
Now, with her wistful eyes apparently watching the agile dancer, she remembered Enid’s horrified protest. “You can’t tell him, Sally! He wouldn’t marry you if he knew. His parents wouldn’t let him. Promise me you won’t tell, darling!”
And so Sally had not told him, but when he did ask her to marry him she refused him. His as yet unannounced engagement to Claire Bainbridge had followed swiftly, but his eyes were still pathetically true to Sally.
She shifted her position a trifle, so that she could observe Arthur Van Horne out of the corner of her eye. Not that she wanted to see him! She had been forced to see so much of him since the night of her debut party that the very sound of his mocking, drawling voice was obnoxious to her. She would never forget her mother’s terror, her abject pleading and tears.