Then she smiled, threw the glass on the dressing-table, and turned to the door.
She had a pleasant excitement in the thought of meeting Longacre. Those cool, blue eyes she had vaguely felt to be a bit critical through their admiration. They roused in her the child’s impulse to “show off,” to surprise them into unreserved praise. Other men were satisfied to find her beautiful, but he seemed to require more. Well, he should see, she thought, with a shake of her darkly burnished head.
He loomed so large to her mental vision that when she actually saw him he seemed small and quiet, less than she had expected—yet (the eyes again) somehow more. He was opposite her at dinner. She caught herself comparing his tie with Thair’s, relieved to find them identical, to see, as Longacre’s head turned toward the woman on his right, that the blond hair, longish over the forehead, was clipped close behind the ears. Correct as one could wish; and yet, her mother had said he was queer. Well, he was—different, odd. She felt ashamed of her inventory, but—well, a man could not afford to be odd.
She reproached herself. He would not condemn her for—wearing lawn over satin. But again, he would—if she sang a false note. Well, he should see!
They had not exchanged a word between the time she had come down and the serving of dinner; but with coffee in the drawing-room she asked him casually if he would play an accompaniment.
Longacre was vaguely dismayed. He had not known that Julia sang. He abhorred drawing-room songs, built to show the voice as a stage gown to show the figure. At the worst, he felt he could not forgive her. At the best, it must be less beautiful than she. And that he should second such a performance! He felt he had changed color. He said he would be delighted. So far, he rose to her conventional ideal. It would not, he felt, have been so bad had they two been alone together; but all these people coming in, murmuring, looking expectant, made a show of it, in which he seemed, to himself, exhibiting Julia, at her worst, to—well, Florence Essington at her best. He fancied the girl’s cheeks were hot, her hands nervous as they skimmed the music.
The song she chose was some selection from a modern Italian opera, a passionate, melancholy thing.
All through the long prelude he found himself expecting and dreading her voice.
When it came at last it bewildered him. It was everything he had not expected, liquid, pliant, full, unerringly true in its leaps and falls through alarming intervals, astonishingly trained. But it chilled him, distressed him, so much more disappointed him than he had feared. It failed in the one thing he had made sure of. The voice was a lovely, hollow shell of sound. Could not a creature with her strong pulse of life, her gorgeous senses, put more of herself, of her passion, into her voice? His accompaniment sang the composer’s meaning with keener comprehension than she, he thought savagely as his fingers fell on the last chord.
But the approval, the banalities, the applause, were all for the singer. They must have it again, Mrs. Budd’s guests.