The world, she gathered, was a place where women played a game of men with each other. It was very difficult, she couldn't comprehend the rules or reason; and Linda was afraid that she would be unsuccessful and never have the perfect time her mother wanted for her. In the first place, she was too thin, and then she knew that she could never talk like her dearest. Perhaps when she had had some wine it would be different.
She decided, after all, to go down to the assemblage; and, by one of the white marble pillars, Mrs. Randall captured her. “Why, here's Linda-all-alone,” Mrs. Randall said. “Mama out again?” Linda replied stoutly, “She has a dreadful lot of invitations.”
Mrs. Randall, who wore much brighter clothes than her mother, was called by the latter an old buzzard. She was very old, Linda could see, with perfectly useless staring patches of paint on her wrinkled cheeks, and eyes that look as though they might come right out of her head. Her frizzled hair supported a dead false twist with a glittering diamond pin, and her soft cold hands were loaded with jewels. She frightened Linda, really, although she could not say why. Mrs. Randall was a great deal like the witch in a fairy-story, but that wasn't it. Linda hadn't the belief in witches necessary for dread. It might be her scratching voice; or the way she turned her head, without any chin at all, like a turtle; or her dresses, which led you to expect a person very different from an old buzzard.
“Of course she does,” said Mrs. Randall, “any number of invitations, and why shouldn't she? Your mother is very pleasant, to be sure.” She nodded wisely to the woman beside her, Miss Skillern.
Miss Skillern was short and broad and, in the evening, always wore curled ostrich plumes on tightly filled gray puffs. She reminded Linda of a wadded chair. Mrs. Randall, after the other's slight stiff assent, continued:
“Your mama would never be lonely, not she. All I wonder is she doesn't get married again—with that blondine of hers. Wouldn't you rather have one papa than, in a way of speaking, a different one at every hotel?”
Linda, completely at a loss for answer, studied Mrs. Randall with her direct deep blue gaze. Miss Skillern again inclined her plumes. With the rest of her immobile she was surprisingly like one of those fat china figures with a nodding head. Linda was assaulted by the familiar bewildered feeling of not understanding what was said and, at the same time, passionately resenting it from an inner sensitive recognition of something wrong.
“How could I have that?” she finally asked.
“How?” repeated Miss Skillern, breathing loudly.
“Yes, how?” Mrs. Randall echoed. “You can ask your mama. You really can. And you may say that, as a matter of fact, the question came from us,” she included her companion.