“It’s fairly definite, however, that you won’t sell,” he concluded.
“Not at your figure,” laughed Sargent. “If we took your money, Doctor Boyd would be too old to preach in the new cathedral.”
“He’ll pull it through some way,” declared Allison. “He’s as smart as a whip.”
Neither gentleman had noticed Gail. She had settled back in her chair during these last speeches, weary and listless, and overcome with a sense of some humiliation too evasive to be properly framed even in thought. She had a sense that she had given away something vastly precious, and which would never be valued. Neither did they notice that she changed suddenly to relief. She had been justified in her decision.
She took the reins of conversation herself after Uncle Jim had left, and entertained Allison so brightly that he left with impatience at the tea party which monopolised her.
Later, when the Reverend Smith Boyd dropped in, he met with a surprising and disconcerting vivacity. In his eyes there was pain and suffering, and inexpressible hunger, but in hers there was only dancing frivolity; a little too ebullient, perhaps, if he had been wise enough to know; but he was not.
CHAPTER XXIII
A SERIES OF GAIETIES
Gaiety consists in rising in the morning so tired that it takes three hours of earnest work with a maid, a masseuse, a physical directress, a hairdresser, and a bonnetiere, before one can produce a spontaneous silvery laugh, which is never required, expected or considered good form before two P.M. Gail Sargent went in for gaiety, and, moreover, she enjoyed it. She rode, she drove, she went calling and received, she attended teas and gave them, she dined out and entertained, in the name of her eager Aunt Grace, she went to theatres, the opera, concerts, and the lively midnight cafés, which had all gone nervously insane with freak dancing, she attended balls, house parties, and all the in-between diversions which her novelty-seeking friends could discover or invent, and she flirted outrageously! She used her eyes, and the pretty pout of her red lips, and the toss of her head, and all the wiles of coquetry, to turn men into asses, and she enjoyed that, too! It was a part of her feminine birthright to enter with zest into this diversion, and it was only envy which criticised her. Aunt Helen Davies, who knew her world by chapter and verse, stood behind the scenes of all this active vaudeville, and applauded. It was at the opera that Aunt Helen could no longer conceal her marvel.
“My dear,” she said, under cover of the throbbing music of Thais, “I have never seen anything like you!”
“I don’t quite know whether to take that as a compliment or not,” laughed Gail, who had even, in her new stage of existence, learned to pay no attention to music.