"You feel O.K.?" he asked her doubtfully. His brown eyes had an almost doglike wistfulness.
"Quite, thank you." Her easy, effortless smile passed across her face and in and out of her eyes.
Hudson stood beside his wheel tapping his teeth and staring after her. The rockers on the veranda stopped their rocking, stopped their talking, stopped their breathing to see Sheila pass. When she had gone, they fastened their attention upon Sylvester. He was not aware of them. He stood there a full three minutes under the glare of publicity. Then he sighed and climbed into his car.
CHAPTER XII
HUDSON'S QUEEN
The lobby, empty of its crowd when Sheila passed through it on her way up to her rooms, was filled by a wheezy, bullying voice. In front of the desk a little barrel of a man with piggish eyes was disputing his bill with Dickie. At the sound of Sheila's entrance he turned, stopped his complaint, watched her pass, and spat into a near-by receptacle. Sheila remembered that he had visited the bar early in the evening before, and had guzzled his whiskey and made some wheezy attempts at gallantry. Dickie, flushed, his hair at wild odds with composure, was going over the bill. In the midst of his calculations the man would interrupt him with a plump dirty forefinger pounced upon the paper. "Wassa meanin' of this item, f'rinstance? Highway robbery, thassa meanin' of it. My wife take breakfast in her room? I'd like to see her try it!"
Sheila went upstairs. She took off her things, washed off the dust, and changed into the black-and-white barmaid's costume, fastening the frilly apron, the cuffs, the delicate fichu with mechanical care. She put on the silk stockings and the buckled shoes and the tiny cap. Then she went into her sitting-room, chose the most dignified chair, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for Dickie. Waiting, she looked out through the window and saw the glow fade from the snowy crest of The Hill. The evening star let itself delicately down through the sweeping shadows of the earth from some mysterious fastness of invisibility. The room was dim when Dickie's knock made her turn her head.
"Come in."
He appeared, shut the door without looking at her, then came unwillingly across the carpet and stopped at about three steps from her chair, standing with one hand in his pocket. He had slicked down his hair with a wet brush and changed his suit. It was the dark-blue serge he had worn at the dance five months before. What those five months had been to Dickie, through what abasements and exaltations, furies and despairs he had traveled since he had looked up from Sheila's slippered feet with his heart turned backward like a pilot's wheel, was only faintly indicated in his face. And yet the face gave Sheila a pang. And, unsupported by anger, he was far from formidable, a mere youth. Sheila wondered at her long and sustained persecution of him. She smiled, her lips, her eyes, and her heart.
"Aren't you going to sit down, Dickie? This isn't a school examination."