“Oh, Gawd!” said Louis.
“He did! You stop your laughing!”
But Mr. Pirini was so overwhelmed that he was obliged to drop into the seat beside her, and there he sat, his handsome head thrown back, all his strong white teeth showing in a prodigious and soundless laugh. Miss Riordan turned upon him in a fury.
“You stop that!” she commanded. “You just better believe me! It’s the truth! A gentleman came and sat down beside me and began talking to me, and by and by he got me them flowers.”
“Sure I believe you!” said Louis. “Why wouldn’t I?”
For a moment she could not speak. Her hate, and the insufferable conviction of her impotence, made her heart beat fast and violently. She felt stifled in a desperate[Pg 223] struggle against complete submersion. Louis would not believe her. She could not make him believe in her gentleman, and to doubt his existence was to deny her a soul. That the old gentleman had talked poetry to her and given her flowers was the sole proof of her own immortal value.
“I tell you it’s true!” she said in a choked voice.
“Sure!” replied Louis, still grinning.
His unfaith was destroying her. Under his arrogant, smiling glance she was disintegrating. The woman whom the old gentleman had addressed, the woman who longed for the mystic beauties of Staten Island as one longs for Paradise, was being done to death, and there would remain only the creatures she saw in her mirror—this ungainly body, this flushed and troubled face. No! No! She had been worthy of the poetry and the flowers. It was Louis who was too base to see her worth.