The clerk looked at her, as he stamped the card, and he continued to look at her, studiously and yet quizzically, as a bell-boy led her back to the elevator. Sunset Bryan and the type of men he stood for, the puzzled clerk knew well enough; but this type of woman he did not know. Sunset, obviously, was branching out.
“You needn’t bother to wait!” she said to the youth who had touched the electric button beside the great, high-paneled door of the apartment.
She stood there quietly until the boy had turned a corner in the hallway; then she boldly opened the door and stepped inside.
The big, many-mirrored, crimson-carpeted room was empty, but from an inner room came the clinking of chopped ice against glass and the hiss of a seltzer siphon. The race-track king was evidently about to take his morning pick-me-up. A heavy odor of stale cigar-smoke filled the place. She wondered what the next step would be.
“Hello, there, Allie, old boy!” the gambler’s off-hand and surprisingly genial bass voice called out, as he heard the door close sharply behind Frances.
That must mean, thought the alert but frightened girl, that Albert Eric Spaulding and the plunger were old friends. Once more the siphon hissed and spat, and the ice clinked against the thin glass. Here was a predicament.
“Hello!” answered the woman, at last, steeling herself into a careless buoyancy of tone ill-suited to the fear-dilated pupils of her eyes.
She heard a muffled but startled “Good God!” echo from the inner room. A moment later the doorway was blocked by the shadow of a huge figure, and she knew that she was being peered at by a pair of small, wolfish eyes, as coldly challenging as they were audacious.
She looked nervously at her gloved hands, at the little handkerchief she was torturing between her slightly shaking fingers. Her gloves, she noticed, were stained here and there with perspiration.
If she had not already passed through her chastening ordeal with a half-drunken English butler, and if the shock of that untoward experience had not in some way benumbed and hardened her shrinking womanhood, she felt that she would have screamed aloud and then incontinently fled—in the very face of those grim and countless resolutions with which she had bolstered up a drooping courage. It flashed through her, with the lightning-like rapidity of thought at such moments, that for all her dubiously honest career she had been strangely sheltered from the coarser brutalities of life. She had always shrunk from the unclean and the unlovely. If she had not always been honest, she had at least always been honorable. Durkin, from the first, had recognized and respected this inner and better side of her beating so forlornly and so ineffectually against the bars of actuality; and it was this half-hidden fineness of fibre in him, she had told herself, that had always marked him, to her, as different from other men.