“Roberta,” she said at last, “if you are ill, you should go home. It would be doing both of us a kindness.”
“I’m not sick,” said Roberta evenly.
“Why do you hate Carrie so much?” persisted Drewena.
“Don’t talk like that,” said Roberta, in despair. “It’s just that she thinks of Martin. She thinks of him in a terrible way. Please don’t question me further.” Roberta opened her compact, studied herself in the tiny mirror and powdered her face lightly, smoothing away the lines from her forehead and looking with detachment at the shadows under her eyes. Drewena took her hand for an instant and held it tightly before she left. But as she walked toward the punchbowl with its merry company, there was an intimate, definite foreboding and a striking glance of prescience from her heavy-lidded eyes. Her appearance was so exotic, so provocative, that when Kate offered her a drink, she wanted to offer her a kiss as well.
The widows around Docky, however, were still discussing Roberta.
“Look at her,” said Daisy, the pretty one. “Holding her jaws down at the side in that manner. If I were half so pretty as she, I wouldn’t hide in the corner like that.”
“I’ll bet you wouldn’t,” yawned Docky, grasping her upper plate, as she had a horror of swallowing it.
Again Patsy’s high voice rang out, this time against the music of the orchestra.
“Miss Devaud,” she bawled.