"As soon as we landed, but Geoffrey made me come away in three weeks because he said I spent so much money." Her face clouded again at the recollection of her embarrassments. "Oh, we had awful scenes, but I hadn't even a wedding dress, you know, and French dressmakers are so frightfully expensive. One of them charged me five thousand dollars for a gown—but he told me that it was really cheap, because he'd sold one to another American the day before for twelve thousand. I don't know who her husband is," she added wistfully, "but I wish I were married to him."
The wildness of her extravagance depressed him even more than her excessive despair had done; and he wondered if the vagueness of her ideas of wealth was due to the utter lack in her of the imagination which foresees results? She had lived since her girlhood in a quiet Virginia town, her surroundings had been comparatively simple, and she had never been thrown, until her marriage, amid the corrupting influences of great wealth, yet, in spite of these things, she had squandered a fortune as carelessly as a child might have strewed pebbles upon the beach. Her regret at last had come not through realisation of her fault, but in the face of the immediate punishment which threatened her.
"So he got you out of Paris? Well, I'm glad of that," he remarked.
"He was perfectly brutal about it, I wish you could have heard him. Then we went down into Italy and did nothing for months but look at old pictures—at least I did, he wouldn't come—and float around in a gondola until I almost died from the monotony. It was only after I found a lace shop, where they had the most beautiful things, that he would take me away, and then he insisted upon going to some little place up in the Alps because he said he didn't suppose I could possibly pack the mountains into my trunks. Oh, those dreadful mountains! They were so glaring I could never go out of doors until the afternoon, and Geoffrey would go off climbing or shooting and leave me alone in a horrid little hotel where there was nobody but a one-eyed German army officer, and a woman missionary who was bracing herself for South Africa. She wore a knitted jersey all day and a collar which looked as if it would cut her head off if she ever forgot herself and bent her neck." Her laughter, the delicious, irresponsible laughter of a child, rippled out: "She asked me one day if our blacks wore draperies? The ones in South Africa didn't, and it made it very embarrassing sometimes, she said, to missionary to them. Oh, you can't imagine what I suffered from her, and Geoffrey was so horrid about it, and insisted that she was just the sort of companion that I needed. So one day when he happened to be in the writing-room where she was, I locked the door on the outside and threw the key down into the gorge. There wasn't any locksmith nearer than twenty miles, and when they sent for him he was away. Oh, it was simply too funny for words! Geoffrey on the inside was trying to break the heavy lock and the proprietor on the outside was protesting that he mustn't, and all the time we could hear the missionary begging everybody please to be patient. She said if it were required of her she was quite prepared to stay locked up all night, but Geoffrey wasn't, so he swung himself down by the branches of a tree which grew near the window."
All her old fascination had come back to her with her change of mood, and he forgot to listen to her words while he watched the merriment sparkle in her deep blue eyes. It was a part of his destiny that he should submit to her spell, as, he supposed, even Geoffrey submitted at times.
He was about to make some vague comment upon her story, when her face changed abruptly into an affected gravity, and turning his head, he saw that Lydia had come noiselessly into the room, and was advancing to meet her daughter with outstretched arms.
"Why, Alice, my child, what a beautiful surprise! When did you come?"
As Alice started forward to her embrace, Ordway noticed that there was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of her body.
"Only a few minutes ago," she replied, with the characteristic disregard of time which seemed, in some way, to belong to her inability to consider figures, "and, oh, I am so glad to be back! You are just as lovely as ever."
"Well, you are lovelier," said Lydia, kissing her, and adding a moment afterward, as the result of her quick, woman's glance, "what a charming gown!"