“Thanks. Sooner the better. Perhaps I could persuade the Pelhams to get out. Topper says they left cards and that gives me an excuse to call on them.”
Mr. Donald gave his smallest and tightest smile. “Try, by all means,” he said. “And your luck seems to have changed. Now, I must really bid you good-day. I shall be over again shortly with papers to sign.”
CHAPTER VII
It was Easter Sunday and Gita was strolling along the Boardwalk. Mr. Donald had considerately sent her a check and she had bought a small black sailor hat, which she wore on the back of her head that her cropped hair should further demonstrate her complete indifference to feminine allure. She had also invested in a black sport skirt that she might be able to keep one hand in a pocket, and in the other she carried a swagger-stick. A stiff white shirtwaist and black tie completed her toilette. She flattered herself that she looked like a boy masquerading as a girl and was somewhat disconcerted when no less than two passing men murmured, “Cutie.” Then she was abruptly a haughty young woman—and a Carteret—freezing impertinent libertines.
“But if I only were a boy,” she sighed. “I don’t believe I’d even mind work. And girls are ten thousand times nicer than men. Then I could fall in love with one of them, and now that is forever denied me.”
But she did not really feel sad. The warm gold sun rode in an unflecked sky. The sea rolled in to the white sands in long sparkling indolent waves. Over the hard beach young people were riding horseback and children were driving little carts, or building in the sand. A great liner drifted on the horizon.
The Boardwalk was so crowded that Gita was forced to move at a far more leisurely pace than her habit, and it seemed to her that in all that vast throng there was but one expression: a composite expression of vacant contentment. If they were subject to the common misfortunes and cares of humanity, for the present they were unable to recall them.
Here and there she saw a woman fashionably dressed, but to what world she belonged Gita did not hazard a guess. There were perhaps a hundred tailor-made girls, as slim as laths, very trim, very conscious that they were turned out by one of the autocrats of fashion. But the mass were frankly tourists with no money to spend on anything but cheap imitations of the prevailing styles. There were college boys arm in arm and walking four abreast, and large carefully dressed males with roving predatory eyes.
In the close monotonous procession of rolling chairs propelled up and down the middle of the broad promenade by colored men or white derelicts, were couples too fat and overfed to walk or too old and tired. A few elderly ladies and gentlemen looked as if they may have sauntered on the Walk in its heyday and still came for the ozone which no change in fashion could alter.
Gita wondered what the façade of Atlantic City had looked like when these devitalized relics were in their prime. Today hotels of varying magnificence, with at least one triumph of modern architecture, were connected by a flimsy chain of low-browed buildings: Japanese or Chinese curio-shops; shops for linen, lingerie, sweaters and blouses; candy-stores; shops devoted exclusively to salt-water taffy, “cut to fit the mouth”; restaurants, motion-picture theaters, bookstores, shoe-stores, milliners; displays of costumes unapproachable in elegance and price; cigar stands, cheap rooming-houses, toy-stores, drug-stores, auction-rooms, art-shops of highest and lowest quality; booths where silhouettes were taken while you wait, stands for post-cards, newspapers, magazines; jewelers; five-and-ten-cent stores. Interrupted at set intervals by flights of steps or “inclines” leading down to the avenues of Atlantic City. Opposite, reaching far out into the water, six monstrous piers offering concerts, soft drinks, moving pictures, tearooms, ballrooms, and long decks for chairs.