And so long as she confined herself solely to looking at Julie, she did find her fascinating. She was very young—years younger than Horace, and filled with an ardent vitality. She produced an extraordinary effect of brilliancy, although her conversation was far from clever. She was one of those people who absolutely take one’s breath away; her glances, her gestures, her gipsy vividness wrought a spell; one could watch her in a daze, indefinitely.
But the fascination wore off a bit for Frances after she had experienced something of Julie’s famous rudeness. She was utterly ignored. Horace tried to talk to her, but he was not fluent, and his dinner engrossed him. She had nothing to do but listen to Julie talking to Lionel, a torrent of gossip about people not personally known to either of them, glib comment on plays and books and fashions and dances. Lionel’s interest lay in just these things; he had as many stories as she: those mysterious tales of prominent people, confidential to a degree, heard from someone who really knows.... If Lionel hated and despised Julie and she loathed him, they dissembled it well. They were friendly, they were more than friendly, they were comrades. He had never talked with such interest to Frankie!
“Did you notice Mrs. Lord on the Avenue yesterday, Li? I never saw such a fool. A skirt like that with her celebrated bowlegs!”
And so on. The impossibleness of Julie was now fully evident to Frances, the gross vulgarity beneath her dainty charm, the malice, the nastiness in her shallow heart. She was glad Lionel didn’t like her; she told herself that his absorption in her chatter was only politeness.
When the dinner was over, she retired with Julie to a little music room, where Julie began to smoke. She changed abruptly now that there were no men about, became frankly, brutally hard.
“Well!” she said. “You’ve picked a winner! When Horace told me Li was going to be married, I couldn’t believe it. I told him there wasn’t a girl on earth who’d be such a fool.”
“Why?” asked Frances coldly.
“The boy’s a joke, my dear child! A perfect joke! The biggest idiot there is. He spent all the money his mother left him in two years, just making a fool of himself. And now he expects to sit down on Horace for the rest of his little life. It makes me sick.”
Frances had grown rather pale.
“I suppose he thinks he is welcome in his brother’s house,” she said.