V
Janet was struck with the fact that he had never looked better. Robert, as dynamic as a battery giving out blue sparks, was familiar enough to her. But Robert, with a deepening pink spreading over his pale cheeks, and with a suit that showed the craftsmanship of a fashionable Fifth Avenue tailor, was a sight to make one gasp and stare. Nor was this all. In times past, she had often conjured up a picture of him poised as on a springboard, preparing to leap upward to join the spirits of the air. But there was nothing aerial about the way in which his feet now gripped the solid ground.
She couldn't get over the change!
When he alluded briefly to a trip to California from which he had just returned and on which he appeared to have done some work for the Confederated Press, she had the sensation of not being in a secret that all the rest shared. This was the sort of discourtesy that had hitherto been taboo in Charlotte's crowd, and she resented being made a victim of it.
"Then the Confederated Press knew better than to give you your walking papers?" drawled Lydia.
"They knew nothing," replied Robert. "I simply paid them to keep me on and to let me say exactly what I pleased."
This was more mystifying to Janet than ever.
Presently, Mark Pryor proposed a walk to the Lorillard model tenements to inspect Number Fifteen, Cornelia's old flat. It turned out that Robert had rented it and that Donald Kyrion, perhaps the youngest and certainly the most talented interior designer in New York, had decorated it for him as a labor of love. Pryor pronounced the result: "Art that congealed art!"
"Donald Kyrion?" said Lydia. "If Robert got him to do anything for nothing he ought to get the Nobel prize for wonder-working."
"Ahem!" said Pryor, and again he and Robert exchanged knowing glances.