“There was Aldous Huxley. I think that was the name.”
“Well, I suppose he might have more for her at this stage in her life than you, Ariel.” His tone was dry. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. But it was too dark for Ariel to see that now. “There’s Mrs. Nevin’s house,” he said suddenly. “All lighted up. So she’s at home before us. Ours is the next place.”
Ariel saw a great house, as magnificent as Government House, crowning a low hill above them with dozens of windows blazing through the dusk. “That’s Holly. Her husband, Nevin, built it. It’s palatial, isn’t it! Wild Acres is much humbler. You’ll see in a minute. Or rather in a few minutes, because there’s a long, very twisty avenue up to our portico and you don’t really know there’s a house until you practically come, bump, into the front door. Here’s the entrance.”
The car had turned in through a dark, rather low, stone archway, and the headlights were cutting a golden shaft up through snow-enchanted, stilly woods.
Chapter VI
Ariel was in no hurry for Anne to come. She pulled the shades at the two windows, shutting out the dark-white woods whose tree boughs came right up against the panes. Then she slipped out of her coat and dropped it on the white counterpane of the bed, scarlet lining upwards. The room was not warm, for here on the second floor, and more particularly in the wing where the guest rooms were situated, one needed a fire in the grate in winter weather. But Ariel had come too freshly in from the cold air in her face, and was too recently out of the warmth of the fur coat, to mind the cold yet. She threw herself on the bed beside the coat and lifting one soft sleeve rubbed it against her face. Silly girl! Her eyelashes were soaked with tears. The fur grew slowly wet, against her face.
An odd clumsy noise was coming down the hall outside her door. Some one walking on stilts? Ariel sprang up from the bed in time for the knock on the door. The sight of the girl who answered Ariel’s invitation to enter was more startling than the sound had been. It was Anne, wrapped in a black silk kimono embossed from shoulder to hem in huge geometrical figures gone wrong in color and form,—a witch’s dream of color and design. Her legs were bare, and it was the high heels of the mules slipped onto her bare feet—green mules decorated with inordinate purple puffs of feather—which had made the stilt-walking noises in the hall and still made them in the room. Ariel, who had been promised a meeting with Hugh’s sister, was taken aback and left wordless at this meeting with a kimono and mules instead.
It was hard to believe that Anne was real, a girl, and not a doll, walking. Ariel remembered the hateful dolls which had for some time now been an offense to her sensibilities and her father’s in gift-shop windows in Hamilton and St. George’s. This girl brought them vividly to mind: dangling yard-long legs that could be tied in knots after they were crossed at the knees, black hair parted in a seam down the exact middle of the head and whirled into tight sleek buttons over the ears, crazy outstanding wirelike eyelashes, dead-white cheeks, magenta mouths warped by the paint brush into an eternal leer. But from these horrid images you were shielded by the glass of shop windows. Never had Ariel dreamed that she would become involved with a living one.
The magenta lips opened. Words fell out. “Well, hello, Ariel Clare. Were you seasick?”
The deep throaty voice with the catch in it only heightened the doll effect.