With a grace which long practice had made a fine art, she sank upon one end of a divan, and back among a mass of cushions. Her white arms lay along the pillows in such careless wise as to best exhibit their perfection; her head dropped backward slightly, revealing the round throat. The attitude was so natural as to suggest that she had ceased to pose.
Patience stared at her, wondering if it could be the same Rosita. All the freshness of youth was in that beautiful face and round voluptuous form, but she looked years and years and years older than the Rosita of Monterey. Patience suddenly felt young and foolish and green. The world that had been so great and wonderful to her imagination seemed to have shrunken to a ball, to be tossed from one to the other of those white idle hands.
“What has changed you so?” she asked abruptly.
Rosita gave the low delicious laugh of which Patience had read in the New York “Day.” She relit her cigarette and blew a soft cloud.
“I will tell you after luncheon. You are the only person I would never fib to. I believe those grey eyes of yours are the only honest eyes in the world. Why are you in black?”
Patience told her, and was drawn on to speak of herself and her life. Rosita shuddered once or twice, an adorable little French shudder, and cast upward her glittering hands, whose nails Patience admired even more than their jewels.
“Dios de mi alma!” she cried finally. “What an existence!—I cannot call it life. I should have jumped into the river. That life would drive me mad, and I do not believe that it suits you either.”
She spoke with a Spanish accent, and with the affected precision of a foreigner that has carefully learned the English language. Her monotony of inflection was more effective than animation.
“No, it doesn’t,” said Patience, “and I have no intention of pursuing it. I’m going to be a newspaper woman.”
Rosita gave forth a sound that from any other throat would have been a shriek.