The Crystal Cup

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“Not with anyone but Gita. Perhaps not forever even with her. Time works wonders even to one’s inside. But no one but Eustace will turn the trick. He’s the man for her in every way and she really adores him in her own queer fashion. She’ll never give ten cents for Geoffrey Pelham nor anyone else.”

“I’m not so sure. She is Gerald Carteret’s daughter, and the living image of him. Nor were the Carteret women, although their virtue was proverbial, ever known as what you call asexual. The men were lawless, and Gita strikes me as more like them than like the women of her family. And although she started out in life by hating men you can see for yourself how she’s changed. Nothing she did would surprise me. You know how high-handed she is. What she wants she will have——”

“No more high-handed than I am. You forget this is the age of high-handedness. What we want we’ll damn well get. And the devil take the hindmost. Well, I’m off to dress.”

CHAPTER VI

Gita was only half-dressed when she heard Polly’s voice downstairs. She had not slept until long after daylight. To her intense annoyance and perplexity her mind iterated and reiterated the scene between herself and Geoffrey Pelham. As a rule she fell asleep the moment she turned off the light, no matter how exciting the preceding hours may have been, and she looked upon Pelham almost with awe that he could disturb the habit of a lifetime. Even the ugly worries and agitations of the past had never interfered with sound healthy nights.

The moment she was encompassed by darkness she had been back in the Pleyden dining-room with Geoffrey Pelham’s voice in her ears, her eyes on his white strained face until she dropped them in consternation. She supposed that another woman, recalling a declaration from a man as attractive as that would have thrilled at the haunting memory; but her body was quiescent, it was only her brain that blazed like a bonfire. . . . She was not even sure he had captured her imagination, he had merely “started something.” . . .

No doubt her vanity. . . . But she had had a good many spasms of vanity this last year. She had been inordinately set up when she had made a conquest of Eustace Bylant. . . . Her mirror had received a good many confidences. Yes, she was as vain as a peacock. No need of a man more or less to keep it awake. Certainly wouldn’t keep her awake. . . .

She recalled the night of the manor ball when she and Pelham had sat alone in the drawing-room. He had outshone every man at the party in looks and distinction. . . . She remembered certain odd sensations. . . . Another Gita Carteret. That was it. No doubt if she had sat in that room two hundred years ago with a young man as handsome and winning as that she’d have fallen in love with him then and there. For the first time she was conscious of regret that such an exciting experience was denied her. It would be immeasurably interesting to love a man like Geoffrey Pelham—especially as he looked that night. Nothing very romantic about a man dressed like a waiter and eating chicken salad. . . .

That, perhaps, was it. Romance. It was not the dearth of sex-fires she was regretting—that idea was as abhorrent as ever—but the romances all those beautiful Carteret girls had experienced before her and handed down as her birthright. She would even have been glad if her mother—who would have been happier dead anyhow—could have gone when she was a child and her father had sent her to her grandmother. She would have grown up a true Carteret girl and come into her birthright. She might or might not have met Geoffrey Pelham but she would have had her romance sooner or later. . . . But no, she had met a good many men now, some of them charming and congenial enough. It would have been Geoffrey Pelham and no other. Perhaps they were both living again after two hundred years’ sleep and had once met and loved in that old manor. There had been something oddly aware that night—but that was nonsense. She might be too educated to assume that anything, including reincarnation, was fabulous, but she didn’t believe it all the same. It was merely the law of mutual attraction at work. Men and women were falling in love every day all over the world with no assistance from metempsychosis. . . . And she was by no means “in love.” Silly phrase. Moronotic. . . . What might have been and what was were two entirely different matters. It was merely that some subtle magnetic quality in his personality suggested romance—every girl’s birthright—or had that night. There was nothing very romantic about a surgeon always carving up people and getting blood all over himself . . . and they had to cut up corpses before they could do that, and hardly ever read anything but stiff medical journals.

. . . Still he did and that was the end of it. When that set grimness left his face it looked sensitive and eager, almost boyish . . . and no doubt he could be ardent enough. He was boxed up—had been—would have to be now more than ever if he loved her as much as he thought he did. She gave a sigh of pity. Poor devil. Why had he lit on her of all girls? Polly was——But she turned her thoughts away from Polly.