| ORDWAY BELKNAP | ||||
| O | ||||
| NADIA MDEVANI | O | O | ROMANY MONTE VIDEO | |
| NEIL CRAWFORD | O | O | MILTON DORN | |
| JULIAN PRENTICE | O | O | HARTLEY BLAKE | |
| JOEL LACEY | O | O | SYDNEY CRAWFORD | |
| O | ||||
| BERTRAND WHITTAKER | ||||
was the way they sat at dinner.
Belknap regretted Miss Video on his left. He was one of the few who had never been properly infatuated with the Romany patteran, as he privately named her for her continuous flow of inconsequential chatter, and had therefore never liked her. It was one thing or the other with Romany. She was a sylph-like creature with enormous eyes, an auburn Viennese bob, and a disingenuous manner. She ‘needed’ them, was the way men put it, first their friendship, then their protection, finally their passion. You couldn’t somehow let her down by disappointing her. They said she was weak and easily swayed, and each in turn flattered himself he could strengthen her philosophy against a bitter world (a world he helped to embitter, if he could but see it that way), and help her get on her feet. Yet somehow she had never mastered this art of walking alone!
Belknap, always irritated by willowy natures, now wished her in Kingdom Come. He wanted to renew the dangerous but charming intimacies that had swiftly and strangely sprung up between himself and Nadia Mdevani; and here would have been his opportunity, with Nadia beside him sending odd disturbing currents up the arm that almost brushed hers. He felt her mind being restive and wild, puzzled and angry, and above all keenly intent on a loophole of escape. If anyone else should succeed in silencing Whittaker forever it would not be because Nadia had yielded her designs but because she had delayed long enough to be cunning and intricate in their workmanship. She even seemed, now that the die was cast, rather to relish the added risk of having Belknap in the arena with her. Whittaker, asked for a description of Nadia, would have said the obvious things about raven locks and snowdrift skin, with eyes too revealing to go revealed. Belknap, after this evening, would have spoken of her in terms of a banked fire with a scent of brimstone. With less than half his exasperated attention given to Romany’s innumerable reasons, centering in jealousy, why she had not been assigned to lead in After Midnight, he glanced surreptitiously at Nadia. Her face, ivory white and immobile, signified nothing. He wondered whether he might be mistaken in thinking the atmosphere so heavily charged between them. His appraising eye passed down the table, appreciating beauty and distinction where he found it, and paused at Joel—dear Joel, not beautiful perhaps, but dear looking. Belknap, in his fashion, had loved her; but for his own bachelor’s sake (he was not an unselfish man), as well as for her youth’s sake, he had never spoken of it to her. Looking unwaveringly ahead into a night that might well be terrible for them all, he felt a particular pang for her. She was talking sotto voce with Julian:
“Hush, dear, people are listening.”
“Then darling, more darling, most darling.”
“Don’t, please!”
“I want to see your amber eyes, not the back of a leaf-brown head.”
“Don’t say things like that at the table. Speak when you are spoken to.”
“Can’t you say something nice to me?”