“Just a moment: who on earth is Jimmy Brance?”
She exclaimed in wonder: “You were absorbed—not to remember Jimmy Brance! He must have been right about you, after all.” She let her amused scrutiny dwell on him. “But how could you? She was false from head to foot!”
“False——?” In spite of time and satiety, the male instinct of ownership rose up and repudiated the charge.
Miss Viner caught his look and laughed. “Oh, I only meant externally! You see, she often used to come to my room after tennis, or to touch up in the evenings, when they were going on; and I assure you she took apart like a puzzle. In fact I used to say to Jimmy—just to make him wild—: ‘I’ll bet you anything you like there’s nothing wrong, because I know she’d never dare un—‘” She broke the word in two, and her quick blush made her face like a shallow-petalled rose shading to the deeper pink of the centre.
The situation was saved, for Darrow, by an abrupt rush of memories, and he gave way to a mirth which she as frankly echoed. “Of course,” she gasped through her laughter, “I only said it to tease Jimmy——”
Her amusement obscurely annoyed him. “Oh, you’re all alike!” he exclaimed, moved by an unaccountable sense of disappointment.
She caught him up in a flash—she didn’t miss things! “You say that because you think I’m spiteful and envious? Yes—I was envious of Lady Ulrica.... Oh, not on account of you or Jimmy Brance! Simply because she had almost all the things I’ve always wanted: clothes and fun and motors, and admiration and yachting and Paris—why, Paris alone would be enough!—And how do you suppose a girl can see that sort of thing about her day after day, and never wonder why some women, who don’t seem to have any more right to it, have it all tumbled into their laps, while others are writing dinner invitations, and straightening out accounts, and copying visiting lists, and finishing golf-stockings, and matching ribbons, and seeing that the dogs get their sulphur? One looks in one’s glass, after all!”
She launched the closing words at him on a cry that lifted them above the petulance of vanity; but his sense of her words was lost in the surprise of her face. Under the flying clouds of her excitement it was no longer a shallow flower-cup but a darkening gleaming mirror that might give back strange depths of feeling. The girl had stuff in her—he saw it; and she seemed to catch the perception in his eyes.
“That’s the kind of education I got at Mrs. Murrett’s—and I never had any other,” she said with a shrug.
“Good Lord—were you there so long?”