Gita had ceased to fear men and found many of Eustace’s friends as likable and amusing as she had anticipated. Whether a bride was sacrosanct even in a circle whose bugle-cry was scorn of tradition, or they cared for no reckoning with Bylant, or thought her too difficult game for a busy age, was a matter of indifference to her. They admired her extravagantly, but they let her alone. Once Peter Whiffle kissed her instep, but she had turned her eyes away from so much worse that she was inclined to be lenient and merely brushed him off as she would a mosquito. They discussed esoteric literature at odds with the censor for the rest of the evening.
“Gita——”
“Well—once more. You look as if you had something on your mind. Better get it off.”
“I can’t help wondering—I witnessed a good many changes before you married . . . but this winter in New York has changed you still more——”
“Developed, dear Elsie. You’re careless in the use of words, for a stylist. We don’t change, you know.”
“Not literally perhaps—unless, to be sure, the endocrines go wrong. But it looks a good deal like it sometimes! Perhaps ‘thawed’ would be a better word still. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to see you dancing next winter.”
“I don’t think so. There are some things I dislike as much as ever. Men are all very well as long as you don’t get too close to them. Then they smell of gin. And—well, I shouldn’t like it, that’s all. Some of those men are all right but it takes just one cocktail to turn two or three I could mention into silly beasts. If I danced with one I couldn’t refuse any of them and then anything might happen. So far, I’m safe from all but stuttering compliments on my eyelashes or my ears.”
Elsie laughed. “You’re safe enough. And probably right. There isn’t one of them, I fancy, who wouldn’t like to take you away from Eustace, but they’re afraid of you both. . . . But you have thawed, and you’ve become a good deal of a woman of the world; you’ve cast out a good many inhibitions and prejudices. You’ve got used to things. You even took Marian Starr Darsett for a drive the other day, and it is the particular pride of our sophisticates that she has had more lovers than any woman in the world for her age. You find her charming and you’ve grown as indifferent as the rest of us to conduct as long as the personality pleases you and jiggledy morals don’t interfere with table manners.”
“That’s all true. I look upon life as a pageant and am grateful for its variety and not out to reform it. Miss Darsett is a beauty and a genius and a charming creature; and her private life—personal rather; nothing very private about it—is her affair, not mine.”
“But don’t you see what a stride you’ve taken? Any hint of sex, even under the ægis of holy matrimony, utterly disgusted you. If Polly and I had been even the usual susceptible females, let alone Marian Darsetts, you’d have swept us out with a broom.”