Seated in Section 10, waiting for the porter to bring back his personal impedimenta from the drawing-room, Harry Lontaine turned a handsome face to the window, frowning absently, the nervous frown of a man whose cleverness has never proved quite equal to the task of satisfying appetites at once strong and fastidious.
By degrees its place was taken by a look of dreaming: Lontaine was viewing not the dreary wastes of Kansan lands under the iron rule of Winter but a California of infatuate imagining, a land all smiling in the shine of a benign sun, set with groves of orange trees and olives, dotted with picturesque bungalows whose white walls were relieved by the living green of vines, and peopled by a race of blessed beings born to a heritage of lifelong beauty, youth, and love-in-idleness; a land in whose charmed soil fortunes grew of seeds of careless sowing, and through whose scenes of subtropical loveliness prophetic vision descried a heroic figure moving, courted and applauded by happy, unenvious multitudes, the figure of Harry Lontaine, Esq., newest but mightiest overlord of the cinema....
From this delectable realm the dreamer was recalled by consciousness of somebody standing in the aisle and staring impertinently. Racial shyness erased all signs of wistfulness in one instant and cloaked sensitiveness in a guise of glacial arrogance; in another, recognition dawned, and hauteur was in turn discarded and a more approachable mien set up in its stead. Lontaine was too diligent a student of motion-pictures not to know at sight the features of Lynn Summerlad, by long odds the most popular male star of the American cinema. A personage worth knowing....
Misreading his expression, Mr. Summerlad felt called upon to apologize.
"Beg your pardon, but I was expecting to find a lady in this section, I may say a friend: a Mrs. Druce. Do you by any chance——?"
XIX
Bridge killed the long hours of that first afternoon on board a train whose windows revealed seldom a prospect less desolate than one of prairie meadows fallowed but frozen, dusky beneath a tarnished sky: a still and roomy land spaciously fenced, scored by rare roads that knew no turning, but ran like ruled diameters of the wide ring of the horizon: the wheat-bin of the world swept and garnished by winter winds.
Lynn Summerlad made a fourth at the table set up in the Lontaine drawing-room; invited by Lontaine as an acquaintance of Lucinda's and a grateful addition to the party because he played something better than merely a good game.
Not only "fearfully easy to look at" (as Fanny confided to Lucinda) but fair spoken and well if at times a shade carefully mannered, he was intelligent and ready of wit; so that, when he proved these qualities by not forcing himself upon the trio at or after dinner, he was missed; and Lucinda, while she waited for sleep to blind her eyes that night, discovered that she was looking forward to the next afternoon, when Bridge would be again in order and infeasible without the fourth.