Sarah and Anne Preston were there, and wherever the Preston sisters appeared there also were usually gathered together men, not to the number of two and three, but in full quorum. And, besides the Preston sisters, this group included Miss Buford and a fourth girl.
Indeed, it seemed to be this fourth who held, with entire unconsciousness, more than an equal share of attention. Duska Filson was no more cut to the pattern of the ordinary than the Russian name her romantic young mother had given her was an exponent of the life about her. She was different, and at every point of her divergence from a routine type it was the type that suffered by the contrast. Having preferred being a boy until she reached that age when it became necessary to bow to the dictate of Fate and accept her sex, she had retained an understanding for, and a comradeship with, men that made them hers in bondage. This quality she had combined with all that was subtly and deliciously feminine, and, though she loved men as she loved small boys, some of them had discovered that it was always as men, never as a man.
She had a delightfully refractory way of making her own laws to govern her own world—a system for which she offered no apology; and this found its vindication in the fact that her world was well-governed—though with absolutism.
The band was blaring something popular and reminiscent of the winter’s gayeties, but the brasses gave their notes to the May air, and the May air smoothed and melted them into softness. Duska’s eyes were fixed on the green turf of the infield where several sentinel trees pointed into the blue.
Mr. Walter Bellton, having accomplished the marvelous feat of escaping from the bookmaker’s maelstrom with the immaculateness of his personal appearance intact, sauntered up to drop somewhat languidly into a chair.
“When one returns in triumph,” he commented, “one should have chaplets of bay and arches to walk under. It looks to me as though the reception-committee has not been on the job.”
Sarah Preston raised a face shrouded in gravity. Her voice was velvety, but Bellton caught its undernote of ridicule.
“I render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s—but what is your latest triumph?” She put her question innocently. “Did you win a bet?”
If Mr. Bellton’s quick-flashing smile was an acknowledgment of the thrust at his somewhat notorious self-appraisement, his manner at least remained imperturbably complacent.
“I was not clamoring for my own just dues,” he explained, with modesty. “For myself, I shall be satisfied with an unostentatious tablet in bronze when I’m no longer with you in the flesh. In this instance I was speaking for another.”