“Oh, no!” Elsie gave her rippling laugh. “I’m no matchmaker, and if I were you’d be the last person on earth whose love-destiny I’d dare have a hand in. I’m not sure you’ll even tolerate Geoff because he’s my brother. I don’t know what he may have done in his off moments but I do know that women don’t interest him and he makes no effort to talk to them. He’s rather silent, even with us. Carving up someone in his mind, I suppose. But I’d like to have you meet him, simply because he is my brother, and you, my dear, have become a part of my life.”
Gita kissed her for the first time. It was a peck, but it meant as much, Elsie knew, as the remark that followed. “I’ll come, of course, and I’ll try not to hate him.”
CHAPTER XI
Elsie had never been able to refurnish her old house, but she could have pink lights in the dining-room, and a bowl of pink roses on the table to draw attention from the worn linen and serviceable plates. Colored servants had long since relieved Mrs. Pelham of the “fine china” and Bohemian glass of palmier days. The simple platters and vegetable-dishes were of indestructible silver and she polished them herself.
Gita, whose table was overloaded with massive silver, fit only for a banquet hall, and who had dropped one of the forks on a priceless dish, the fragments removed by a muttering Topper, felt a sharp pang of homesickness: she was reminded of her mother’s pathetic attempts to give beauty to the homeliest surroundings, if the result were but a bowl of wild flowers or a worn but embroidered kimono thrown over the bald sofa of a pension.
There was a third at the table, for Geoffrey Pelham had met a friend on the Boardwalk and brought him home. Neither of the men wore evening clothes, but Mrs. Pelham, whose austere face shone with a light that seemed to Gita nothing less than miraculous, wore her best black satin (by no means the soft and clinging fabric of fashion), bordered at the neck and wrists with Irish lace. Elsie’s gown of “Caribbean blue” deepened the hue of her eyes, and the revealed pedestal of her neck gave her head and throat a more girlish beauty. She looked barely twenty and her cheeks were very pink, her eyes very bright. Gita, acutely conscious of her own bare neck and arms, with a rosy glow on their ivory surfaces, tried to concentrate her mind on the excellent food, and answered in monosyllables the occasional remarks addressed to her. It was the first dinner she had attended for over three years, and in San Francisco she had persisted, despite Millicent’s tears, in wearing uncomely little dark frocks with elbow-sleeves and a neck curve that fitted the base of her throat.
The conversational ball rolled between Elsie Brewster and Eustace Bylant. Mrs. Pelham merely beamed on her son, who devoted himself to his dinner and rarely volunteered a remark. Gita, who was appreciative of good looks, however grudgingly she might admit their waste, and whose eyelashes were an effective screen for subtle observation, remarked that Geoffrey Pelham had the hard outlines of his mother redeemed by a keen intellectual life of their own, and a high head with an abundance of fair hair, properly cut at the back but indifferently brushed. His eyes, like Elsie’s, were gray-blue but darker, widely and deeply set; and he showed his battle with fortune, his ambition, and his devotion to his chosen science in a certain set grimness of mouth and nostril. His tall figure had the look of recent affinity with a uniform, an expression even doctors brought back from the war. But although Gita inferred he might be found attractive by women if sufficiently responsive, she dismissed this gift as negligible and concentrated her admiration for a moment on his brow. Like his sister’s it was high and full and had the same expression of intellectual nobility. Probably no lie, as she’d tested out Elsie. . . . Below the eyebrows the face was that of a man whose natural expression might have been nervous, eager, sensitive, but trained to constant and severe repression. A man of a single purpose, no doubt of that. Well, surgery could have him.
She turned her eyelashes on Mr. Bylant, who was still talking to Elsie.
Eustace Bylant was a novelist of considerable distinction, thirty-eight in years, and admittedly the bridge across the chasm that divided the “younger generation,” which had brought a new if somewhat strident note into American fiction, and the stable group that went its serene way based firmly on the traditions of England. His own base was as firm as England’s Gibraltar, but his undiminished curiosity, the activity of his mind, and his genuine interest in current life and thought, enabled him without effort to be as modern as the youngsters. Sometimes more so, for the youngsters were often ingenuously mediæval.
And his religion was art, words his flexible tools; he could create a living picture of dire offensiveness without an offensive word. An inexorable realist, he scorned to introduce beauty where beauty was not, but when forced by the exigencies of the story to create an unclean interior inhabited by persons who declined to wash, he conveyed his meaning so craftily that the reader was uncomfortably aware of an assortment of smells and raucous sounds and ugly images, which he remembered long after dismissing the grease and grime and stenches of less accomplished recorders of life at its worst.