“All the same, I can’t take my eyes off her. She fascinates me. I don’t like her—but I think I’d like to be like her.”
“Heaven forbid! She is a very second-rate person, my dear, and your beauty is real, while hers is only a matter of effect. She fascinates you because she is young and successful, and you see her like for the first time. But she is nothing in the world but a man’s woman, and while as chaste as an Amazon—I suppose Amazons were chaste—has probably been engaged several times—the type is sentimental—I might add, experimental. I caught Lolly hanging over her this afternoon, and she will doubtless put him through his paces. It won’t hurt him; she is not the type that men die for—not even what the French call an allumeuse—just a plain American flirt.”
“She has style,” sighed Catalina.
“Of a sort,” said the New-Yorker, indifferently. Then she turned suddenly to Catalina with the charming sympathy of glance and manner that blinded her friends to the poor ruin of her face. “How you could rout her if you would!” she said. “Don’t you know, my dear, that the woman who receives that sort of promiscuous adulation is always the woman who wants it, who works for it? Given a decent amount of natural charm, and any determined woman can be a belle. But it means more work and self-repression, more patience with bores as well as with the wary, than you would ever give to it. And it means popularity with men and nothing more; no depth of accomplishment or interest in anything vital; and under that assumption of glorified independence she is really a slave, afraid to relax her vigilance lest she lose her hold, never daring to be absent-minded or careless in her dress. Of all the girls I have ever known you have the least reason to envy any one—so banish the cloud!”
Catalina glowed, and reminded herself of the opportunities thrust upon her to be the belle of a season that she had spurned with less than politeness; but in a moment her brows met and she lost her appetite. Over had been drawn into the magnetic current at the head of the table. Miss Holmes was leaning forward as if graciously permitting the stranger to enter, yet herself lured by the wisdom—it was a comment on the narrowness of Moorish streets—that flowed from his lips.
“What idiots men are!” thought Catalina, viciously. “I suppose if I hung on his words like that he’d not hesitate a minute about being in love with me. But I’d like to see myself!”
XX
After dinner Catalina went up to her room to brush her hair—her head ached slightly—and sit for a while by herself before the evening walk. As a rule, she was the first to be down, but to-night she had a perverse desire for Over to come or send for her. She was suddenly tired of meeting him half-way, of being the frank, almost sexless, comrade; she wanted to be sought and made much of. Miss Holmes might be a second-rate, but she was an artist, and Catalina was not above taking a leaf out of her book.
“I’d rather be a hermit and have smallpox than bother forever as she does, according to Mrs. Rothe; and flatter men—not I! But I think I should be more feminine and difficult.”