Mrs. Essington leaned back and laughed silently across to her companion.
“A victoria! Wouldn’t you know she would!” he observed half quizzically, half ruefully.
“She’s so, pretty!”
“Oh, pretty,” he conceded generously enough, as the lady’s full-throated laugh preceded her into the car.
She fairly burst upon them, laughing, blooming, glittering.
“Of all people! You dear things!” She squeezed a hand of each affectionately. “Don’t tell me there is nothing in premonition! I had one when I told James the horses must gallop. ‘James,’ I said, ‘it is absolutely necessary that I catch that train, if I get out and run for it.’ James adores me, though of course he knew we looked ridiculous. But it doesn’t matter, now that I have you—and just as I was expecting to be alone all the way to Monterey!”
She sighed, and sank into the seat Longacre had swung round for her; rose again to be helped out of her coat; removed her hat; caressed her coiffure; resettled in her chair and shifted the fluttering folds of her skirts, with a regret or two for her own helplessness and a hope that the forbearance of her friends was not merely forbearance. Her almond eyes, blue shot with green, implored Longacre’s to refute the self-accusation. But he chose to do so in a neat sentence.
Watching her, he had a sense that by her vivacity she staved off the reproach of superabundant flesh. It was marvelous, the way the avoirdupois seemed to lessen under her animation. The wide cheeks flaring away from the dwindling chin; the tight, rosy little mouth drawn up at the corners in a faint, perpetual smile; the tortoise-shell combs that pressed her glossy hair close above her pointed ears, all reminded Longacre irresistibly of a tortoise-shell—but he stopped the simile to answer Cissy Fitz Hugh’s appeal concerning the fate of his opera.
He answered automatically this question, that had of late begun to weary him, acceding good-naturedly to Mrs. Fitz Hugh’s sweeping declaration of her passion for music in general; but he was unhappily aware that Florence Essington had teasingly assumed the remote but interested air of a spectator at what threatened to be a tête-à-tête. Nay, more: her eyes laughed at his attempts to draw her back. He had the aggrieved feeling of a child whose game has been spoiled. Well, if Florence wouldn’t play, neither would he. But he was pleasant about it. He slid easily from good-humored flattery to genial silence, from genial silence to the smoking-car.
Cissy watched his departure with a pettish mouth. But when the sharp snapping of the vestibule door had shut the two women in together she extended her small, plump feet with a luxurious stretch, and turned to Mrs. Essington with a “Well, my dear!” that implied, “At last!” She created the impression that she had lived only for this moment. Florence seemed to see herself exhibited as Cissy’s sole confidante.