"Will you? All right." He tilted up her face and kissed it. "I'm dining at the National Arts Club to-night, and I guess I shall be late." He pointed his brush at the canvas and made the grimace of a man who's obliged to swallow a big dose of evil-smelling physic. So Betty, who understood and was sorry, put his hand to her lips, bowed to the indifferent lady and slipped away. The room was perceptibly colder when she left. The picture was already four thousand two hundred dollars toward completion, and Betty was just as much relieved as her father, who returned angrily to work to paint in the diamonds. He was sick of that smile.
While waiting for the elevator, Belle gave a rather self-conscious laugh and lifted her tight skirt quickly. "Seen the latest, Betty?" She showed a tiny square watch edged with diamonds worn as a garter. "Cunning, isn't it?"
"Why, I should just think it was! Where did you buy it?"
"Buy it? My dear, can you see me paying three hundred dollars for something that doesn't show? Harry Spearman gave it to me last night, and put it on in his car on the way to the Pierrot Club."
"Put it on?"
Belle threw back her beautiful head and burst out laughing. "You said that just like the Quaker girl in the play at the Hudson. Why shouldn't he put it on? It amused him and didn't hurt me. He's a sculptor, and like the bus-conductor, 'legs is no treat to him,' anyway."
They entered the elevator, dropped nine floors to the wide foyer of the palatial apartment house, and went out into the street. It was a typical New York October afternoon—the sky blue and clear, the sun warm and the air alive with that pinch of ozone of which no other city in the world can boast. The girls instinctively made their way towards Fifth Avenue, warily dodging the amazing traffic, the struggling wagons and plunging horses going in and out of buildings in course of ear-splitting construction, and coal-chutes in the middle of the sidewalks.
"But you were not at the opening of the Pierrot Club last night," said Betty. "I heard you tell Mrs. Guthrie that you were dining with the Delanos and going to their theatre party."
"I know. But Harry Spearman sent round a note in the afternoon asking me to have dinner with him at Delmonico's and go on to the Club to dance. I had such a severe headache that I rang up Mrs. Delano and reluctantly begged to be excused. To quote Nicholas, theatre parties with elderly people bore me stiff. As it was, I had a perfectly corking time till one o'clock and danced every dance."
"Did you tell Mrs. Guthrie?"