Carlota turned her head and smiled at her tenderly. She was used to the scoldings of the old prima donna.
“I am grateful to you, tanta mia,” she said, slipping her hand under the other’s arm. “But I sometimes think I hate Mr. Ward. When I hear his footstep I cannot sing any more, and when he sits there and looks at me I could jump from the window. I hate his eyes and his voice and everything about him.”
Maria’s dark eyebrows arched in amazement. She glanced with quick suspicion at the girl’s troubled face.
“But you have no reason—have you?”
Carlota’s eyes narrowed with amusement at her anxiety. As they entered the lower hall, she stripped off her long gray suède gloves impatiently. The lights were not switched on yet, and she let one fall near the outer steps. It lay, a part of the twilight, unnoticed by either herself or Maria, but one who came behind them picked it up. It was a mere fleeting impression she caught of him. Maria had stepped into the elevator when he reached her side to return it, a curious, poster-like figure, with the uncertain light accentuating his foreign features and half-closed, seeking eyes.
“Yes, it is mine, thank you,” she said gravely, and carried with her upstairs an impression of restless, suppressed dissent and discontent combined with a haunting fragrance of a new cigarette smoke. When she reached the apartment, while Maria hurried to make Russian tea for them, she stood by the window, looking down over the boxes of green. Across the street in the mother-of-pearl gloom, she could see the glow of the cigarette where the boy stood, waiting for something, and it held her with almost a premonition of menace.
CHAPTER III
Over the tea she was unusually silent, while Maria, ensconced at last on her favorite chaise longue, mellowed under the warmth. Carlota’s voice, cool with daring, broke in on her relaxation.
“Maria, when will you treat me as a woman?”
Maria’s face flushed as she spilled the tea blindly on the rug.