"Don't you think you take things too seriously? His fur coat, Italian moustache and flamboyant tie do put one off, of course, but he's one of the comics of the city and, as such, well worth knowing. I wonder you haven't dropped in to see him sometimes. He's conveniently near to you,—luckily for me." She gave a low laugh as she added the last words.
Franklin stood with his back against one of the carved bed-posts, with his hands in his pockets. In various parts of the world he had met all sorts and conditions of women, from the red-cheeked coquettish daughters of mountaineers to the glum squaws of dilapidated Indian chiefs. Also he had come in contact with the rather cold and quizzical society women of England, the great ladies of Paris who have made immobility a fine art, the notorious cocottes of all nationalities and many of those unconsciously pathetic but perfectly happy little women who, as artists' models of the Latin quarter, live with exquisite though temporary morality in an atmosphere in which morals are as scarce as carpets and as little needed. His acquaintanceship with all these various types had been casual, but he had been interested enough in them to study their characteristics, their mannerisms and their tricks. But here, in Beatrix Vanderdyke, was a girl who didn't come under any of the six types of women. She didn't conform in any one way either to his preconceived ideas of herself. Even his brutality hadn't disturbed her. She was still as unruffled as a white fan-tailed pigeon. Her eyes still gleamed with mocking laughter and there was not one single sign of fear, or even of nervousness, in her easiness and grace. His interest in her grew with every moment of delay and her desirability became more and more obvious with every moment that passed. He might have been inclined to let her off had she shown any weakness. His anger might have grown cold had she let him see anything of outraged maidenly modesty. But her present attitude egged him on, added fuel to his fire and doubled his desire to break her will.
"What do you propose to do to-morrow and the day after?" she asked, as though she had been married to him for some time and wanted to make her plans.
The question startled Franklin. "Sufficient for the night," he said.
Beatrix gave one of the tantalizing little bows which were so annoying to her mother. "I see! Probably I shall take my estimable, but rather irritating companion to Europe by the first possible boat. As Mrs. Franklin, I shall be doubly welcomed in English society. The combined and much-paragraphed wealth of our two families will make me a very romantic figure even in England, where blood is wrongly supposed to weigh more than money-bags. It will be very refreshing to be a free agent at last. I wonder what sort of thrill you'll get when you see my face in the Sketch and Tatler among actresses and cabinet ministers' wives and trans-Atlantic duchesses! By this time, of course, the epoch-making news of our alliance,—as Aunt Honoria calls it,—will have been flashed to the far ends of the earth. What'll you do if any legal person asks to see our marriage lines?"
The sheer impertinence of this young woman left him wordless, until, followed by the French maid, Mrs. Lester Keene,—hastily dressed in a discreet Jaeger dressing-gown,—fluttered tremulously in, hurried over to the girl who was popularly supposed to be in her charge, and put her arms dramatically around her shoulders. Then he cursed ripely beneath his breath.
Mrs. Lester Keene was one of those numerous women whose sense of the romantic, whose belief in the lowness of human nature and whose relish for melodrama were the result of having lived a placid, uneventful, incompetent and wholly protected life. Like a boy who is a constant attendant at the movies and carries home with him a keen desire to murder his baby brother and brain his little friends with his father's wood-chopper, Amelia Keene had derived a distorted view of the life and people beyond her horizon from an absolutely quenchless thirst for sensational novels, which she drank in, firmly believing that they gave true pictures of men, women and events.
To Beatrix, who knew this kindly, ineffectual, ordinary little woman through and through, it was funny to see the manner in which she "believed the worst,"—to use one of her own favorite phrases,—of what she saw from a first quick glance. The lofty, museum-like chamber so little suggested the bedroom of a young girl or of any woman except a painted harridan who was accustomed to being surrounded, even in her most intimate moments with grotesque acquaintances, that the presence of Franklin there might have meant nothing. It was conceivable that he and Beatrix, who had the same royal way of disdaining the laws of convention if it suited their purpose to do so, might have arranged to meet there in order to be out of the family eye and to discuss the chaos in which they both stood. It was as unromantic a meeting place as the great echoing hall of the Grand Central Station or the foyer of the Metropolitan Opera House. But Amelia Keene, whose excitement since her few minutes' conversation with Beatrix before dinner had churned her into a condition almost approaching apoplexy, seized with instant avidity at the chance of adding drama to the scene in which she had been called upon to take a part.
"Oh, my darling! My darling!" she cried. "Thank God you sent for me! Am I in time?"
This was altogether too much for Beatrix. She threw one look at her unruffled reflection in the mirror and another at Franklin, the very epitome of self-control, and gave herself up to the enjoyment of a burst of laughter which left her utterly weak. Even Franklin, who was in no mood for hilarity, smiled at the obvious inanity of the remark.