CHAPTER IX
Laura, her face flushed from sleep and a cheerful awakening, her burnished black hair in two great plaits that fell forward on her shoulders far below the waist of her negligée, tiptoed early next morning into the room, next to her own, where she had put Louise. But her tiptoeing was a considerateness wasted. Louise was wide awake. She had scarcely slept at all. The shock of her experience had been heavier than her ensuing weariness, so that, for the greater part of the night, she had lain wide-eyed, gazing into the darkness; dozing once, she had been gripped by a hideous dream, in which she had stood paralyzed by terror, awaiting the approach, from opposite directions, of two gigantic reptiles, wearing the faces of Judd and Jesse. Laura noticed the dark rings under the girl's feverishly bright eyes, and her heart glowed at the thought that Louise, quite as a matter of course, had sought asylum with her.
When the girl had arrived at her apartment on the previous night Laura, far from questioning her, had pantomimed, finger at lip, that Louise was not to tell her anything then; and Louise had been grateful for the fine delicacy of the remission.
Finding Louise awake, Laura, smiling to match the sunlight that streamed through the curtains, and exhibiting none of the curiosity or jarring glumness of manner with which a woman of less tact might easily have intensified the misery of such a situation, sat on the edge of Louise's bed and began to chatter as gaily as if her listener's world had been swimming in rose.
"My dear," she said, stretching her satin-smooth arms high above her head in an abandonment of waking enjoyment, "I feel as chirpful this morning as a sparrow in a wistaria vine. Let's talk until we get hungry. Let's make plans and things. Plan number one: we are going abroad next week, instead of early in May. I can't wait for May. I need things to wear at once. I am positively in rags and tatters, the Cinderella of Central Park West. How is that for one gorgeous plan?" It might easily have been thought, listening to her and studying her enthusiasm, that she was the girl and Louise the woman. But Louise, for all of her still throbbing memory of the night before, was infected with the older woman's unquenchable cheerfulness.
"You talk of going to Europe as if it were a run out to the Bronx in your car, dear," she said, smiling. "And am I really to go with you? At any rate, of course I must ask——" She had meant to say that she must ask her mother's permission; but the thought rushed to her mind that in all likelihood her mother would be only too willing to let her go. Laura divined her thought and rushed to her aid.
"Oh, I shall do all the asking," she interposed. "That's another of my glittering specialties—asking. I'm the most immoderately successful asker, I think, in all North America; yes, and getter, too, I verily believe. Really, I can't remember when I was refused anything that I out-and-out asked for. So I'll arrange that. But with this stipulation: you'll have to ask Mr. Blythe yourself."
"Mr. Blythe?" said Louise, wonderingly. The sound of his name somehow gave her an immediate sense of uplift; but for the moment she failed to catch Laura's meaning. "What is it that I must ask Mr. Blythe about, dear?"
Laura gazed at her with skeptical eyes.
"What is it we were talking about, Louise?" she asked, mischievously. "The Relation of the Cosmic Forces to—er—Mental Healing? The Real Nub of the Suffragettes' Cause? Child, you don't really suppose that you could gallumph off to the continent of Europe with a frivolous, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky person like me without first asking the consent of your guardian—or, at any rate, your guardian-to-be?"