He accepted with a smile the smiling gage of her eyes. They understood each other perfectly.
When it was time to return to the Alexandria, Summerlad insisted on driving them home himself; and as they drew near to Hollywood swung the car sharply off the highroad, and took a by-way leading into the foothills. In a few minutes more they had left behind every hint of civilization, other than the well-metalled way they travelled, and were climbing a road that wound snakily up precipitous mountainsides, threaded unholy gulches, or struck boldly across spine-like ridges from which the ground, clothed in chaparral, fell dizzily away on either hand into black gulfs of silence. The air grew colder, Lucinda and the Lontaines grateful for the wraps which Summerlad had pressed upon them. In the course of half an hour the car halted on an isolate peak, and all the lowlands lay unfolded to their vision, from the foothills to the sea, a land like a violet pool with a myriad winking facets of blue-white light; as some vast store of diamonds might be strewn by hands of heedless prodigality upon a dark velvet field.
Pointing, Summerlad began to recite the names of places represented by lines and groups of lights: Hollywood at their feet, the Wilshire district with Los Angeles beyond, Culver City, Pasadena away to the left, Santa Monica far to the right, Venice, Del Rey, Redondo.... "The kingdoms of the world you're come to conquer, Mrs. Lee."
"I shan't say 'Get thee behind me,'" Lucinda retorted; "I've a sensible notion you're safer where I can keep an eye on you."
It was true enough that the facile infatuation which California inspires in the uninitiate already held her senses in fee; she felt as one might who had miraculously found the way to cross the far horizon and go down into the magic realms of true romance.
But she fell asleep that night to dream of coursing a will-o'-the-wisp through a land whose painted illusion failed and faded as she fled, till in the end there was no more beauty, nor happiness nor hope, but only the bare grin of the desert savage and implacable.
She started awake with her husband's name trembling on her lips.
XXI
The room the Lontaines occupied in the Alexandria adjoined Lucinda's, and while she was lazing over breakfast and trying to find her way about in newspapers whose screaming local patriotism made one feel vaguely ashamed of having been born elsewhere, Fanny tapped on the communicating door and drifted in, en négligé, with a cigarette and an airy nonchalance oddly at war with a problematic shadow that lurked in her eyes.