At this, Cissy, whose mind had evidently contained one doubt as to who would be the other occupant of the back seat, looked contentedly at Longacre handing Julia into her chosen conveyance. He held open the door on the last glimmer of her slippers—then followed her into the carryall. Cissy’s rapid change of expression amounted to a grimace. She shot Florence a look of incredulity, craned hastily around at the carryall windows, started to speak; then she stared rather blankly at the blooming Bess who swung into the seat beside her with the confidence of belonging nowhere else.
Florence looked at Thair, and he gave her almost a grin.
“Place aux dames!” he lilted as the “red devil” slid past the carryall.
They headed the procession down the steep drive, the sea wind in their faces, plunging through black and white shadows of moonlight and oaks, catching the flicker of the Monterey lights, finally rolling through the Del Monte gates with the electric stars overhead drawing huge, sprawling silhouettes of banana and palm on the drive in front, and a string-orchestra sounding somewhere beyond the open French windows.
Florence had never felt more alone in her life than on that swarming hotel veranda. She saw Cissy Fitz Hugh with a hand out to a dozen the minute she was out of the automobile—full-necked, close-cropped men; liquid-eyed women with cheeks like peaches and voices like ringing glass; how Cissy seemed to belong among them, to be one of them with an identity eloquent of a dozen summers of common pursuits, gossips, and scandals.
Florence’s steel and lace sheared through their softer fabrics like a blade through flowers.
The great rooms were filled, jammed. To the hotel inmates had been added by degrees the parties from the cottages along the shore. The assemblage showed its “mixedness” by the sharp lines of its cliques, made up like a Chinese toy—ring within ring; the outer, whoever could manage a night at the hotel for the sake of a show; the inner, by their sharper individuality of manner and gown and their air of belonging exactly where they happened to be, undoubtedly the show, and supremely regardless of it.
Of them, a woman in heliotrope, with passementerie dragons running up her arms, waved to Florence, and drew her into her shouting group, crying, “You here!” and “Who next where!”
“And where,” she wanted to know at the top of her voice, “is the sweet musician—the American with the short hair, who was at your elbow in London?”
“In much the same position,” came Longacre’s soft drawl over Florence’s shoulder.