But though in the kitchen there was cold veal, which it were perhaps poetic to describe as nice, yet even the poetry of that was exceeded by the poetry of the plan. Cassy had planned nothing lean or fat, nothing whatever. She had spoken as a little mother may, in an effort to console, though perhaps prompted subconsciously by the inscrutable possibilities of life. Anything may happen. Already on the stage of which destiny is the scene-shifter, the fates, in their eternal rôle of call-boy, were summoning the actors to the drama in which the leading rôle was hers and on which the curtain was about to rise.
Her father, comforted by the imaginary, looked up. She had gone. From the sling he took his arm. The elbow was stiff, though less stiff than it had been. Moreover the wrist moved readily and the fingers were as flexible as before. Consoled by that, comforted already, he shuffled into the kitchen and consumed the cold veal.
Now, in the crashing car, Cassy's thoughts went forward and back. Her father's question, that had succeeded in being both pointed and pointless, returned. She smiled at it. It would take another Don Juan than Mozart's to entice me, she serenely reflected. Yet, after all, would he have to be so remarkable? At any rate he would have to be fancy free and not engaged as was a certain person who had not so much as said Boo!
Cassy coloured. Always corsetless, she was not straight-laced. Given the attraction and with it the incentive, and that tam-o'-shanter might have gone flying over the windmill. The tam was very safe. There was no incentive and, though there was no moral corset either, she was temperamentally unable to go poaching on another's preserves. Barring the chimerical, that any girl may consider and most girls do, she was straight as a string. A shabby old man had no need to ask.
"Seventy-second!" The trainman bawled unmollifiably at her.
Cassy left a certain person there. Into her thoughts another man had hopped. She surveyed him. He was good-looking. He was rich. These attributes said nothing. A beautiful male—always an anomaly—never attracts a beautiful woman. That other anomaly, a man of inherited wealth, is disgusting to the anarchist. Cassy was a beauty and an anarchist. She was also an aristocrat. The tattered portières of the House of Casa-Evora, the bedrabbled robes of the marquisate, all that was ridiculous to her. She was an aristocrat none the less. She had a high disdain for low things. In the kitchen, which she called the kitchy, she bent her back but not her head. Her head was unbowed. She sullied her hands but not her conscience. A dirty act she could not perform. Aristocrat and anarchist, she was also an artist. With simple things and simple people, she was simple as you please. Stupidity and pretentiousness enraged her. The philistine and the ignoble she loathed.
Now, through the windows of her soul, she surveyed him. His looks, his money, said nothing. On the other hand there was about him an aroma that appealed. The aroma was not the odour that local society exhales. At that Cassy's nose was in the air. A lot of nobodies occupied with nothing—and talking about it! Such was her opinion of the gilded gang, an opinion which Paliser—to do him the justice that the historian should—would have had put to music and arranged for trumpets. It was not that, therefore. The aroma was more fetching. The man talked her language, liked what she liked, never presumed. In considering these factors, she considered her gloves. Thank God, they did not smell of benzine!
"Grand Central!"
Cassy, abandoning Paliser there, went on to Fifth Avenue, where, with the protection of cross-town traffic, she attempted to get to the other side. But half-way, she saw, or thought she saw, the young woman to whom a certain person was engaged. She turned to look, backed into the traffic-sign and put it in motion. Instantly motors were careering at each other. Instantly a purple policeman grown suddenly black, was smitten with St. Vitus.
Dancing and bellowing as he danced, he righted the sign and swore at Cassy, who, for added outrage, had flung herself at him and was smiling sweetly in his swollen face. About them the torrent poured. Then all at once, in a riot that afterwards seemed to her phantasmagoric, the policeman raised a forefinger in salute. From the maelstrom she was hoisted bodily into a car. Somebody, the policeman probably, was boosting her from behind. Never had she suffered such indignities! To accentuate them, somebody else was shouting in her face.