“By jiminy, I’d make my everlasting fortune off you,” Honey Smith once addressed her, as she flew over his head, “selling you to the moving-picture people.”
Wings straight up, legs straight out, arms straight ahead, delicately slender feet, and strong-looking hands dropping like flowers, her only answer to this remark was an enigmatic closing of her thick-lashed lids, a twist into a pose even more sensuously beautiful.
“Say, I’m tired waiting,” Ralph Addington growled one day, when the lovely trio flew over his head in a group. “Why doesn’t that blonde of mine put in an appearance? Oh, Clara, Lulu, Chiquita,” he called, “won’t you bring your peachy friend the next time you call?”
It was a long time, however, before the “peachy one” appeared. Then suddenly one day a great jagged shadow enveloped them in its purple coolness. The men looked up, startled. She must have come upon them slowly and quietly, for she was close. Her mischievous face smiled alluringly down at them from the wide triangle of her blue wings.
Followed an exhibition of flying which outdid all the others.
Dropping like a star from the zenith and dropping so close and so swiftly that the men involuntarily scattered to give her landing-room, she caught herself up within two feet of their heads and bounded straight up to the zenith again. Up she went, and up and up until she was only a blue shimmer; and up and up and up until she was only a dark dot. Then, without warning, again she dropped, gradually this time, head-foremost like’ a diver, down and down and down until her body was perfectly outlined, down and down and down until she floated just above their heads.
Coming thus slowly upon them, she gave, for the first time, a close view of her wonderful blondeness. It was a sheer golden blondeness, not a hint of tow, or flaxen, or yellow; not a touch of silver, or honey, or auburn. It was half her charm that the extraordinary strength and vigor of her contours contrasted with the delicacy and dewiness of her coloring, that from one aspect, she seemed as frail as a flower, from another as hard as a crystal. She had, at the same time, the untouched, unstained beauty of the virgin girl, and the hard, muscular strength of the virgin boy. Her skin, white as a lily-petal and as thick and smooth, had been deepened by a single drop of amber to cream. Her eyes, of which the sculpturesque lids drooped a little, flashed a blue as limpid as the sky. Teeth, set as close as seed-pearls, gleamed between lips which were the pink of the faded rose. The sunlight turned her golden hair to spun glass, melted it to light itself. The shadow thickened it to fluid, hardened it to massy gold again. The details of her face came out only as the result of determined study. Her chief beauty—and it amounted to witchery, to enchantment—lay in a constant and a constantly subtle change of expression.
During this exhibition the men stood frozen in the exact attitudes in which she found them. Ralph Addington alone remained master of himself. He stood quiet, every nerve tense, every muscle alert, the expression on his face that of a cat watching a bird. At her second dip downward, he suddenly jumped into the air, jumped so high that his clutching fingers grazed her finger-tips.
That frightened her.
Her upward flight was of a terrific speed—she leaped into the sky. But once beyond the danger-line her composure came back. She dropped on them a coil of laughter, clear as running water, contemptuous, mischievous. Still laughing, she sank again, almost as near. Her mirth brought her lids close together. Her eyes, sparkling between thick files of golden lash, had almost a cruel sweetness.