“I have been off on a secret glorious errand to a place of which you shall never dream. You would have to have the East in you for that. I have been building paradise to suit myself, bit by bit. The kind of paradise you think of is made for every one, for all sorts of people you couldn’t get along with on earth—so why, I ask, repeat the experiment in the courts of God?
“Nor is paradise for one alone, my friend. It is for the comrades of our souls, scattered sometimes as far as the ends of the rainbow. There are a few golden beings that in some eternal citadel we should hold fast. Do you think—” she exclaimed suddenly—“that if I climbed to the arch of Heaven by my nails I could capture the one great friend of my soul?”
Her tone changed. “I came back. I hungered for Manila. It holds the world for me.”
“It is Scheherezade’s city—full of wonderful adventures!” Julie declared with shining eyes. “I wonder,” she mused, “what it holds for me?”
They seated themselves at the table before golden iced mangoes. The huge silver bowl in the center was loaded with great scarlet blossoms whose perfume saturated the Air. They seemed to faint under their own fragrance, for Julie observed that while dewily fresh at the commencement of the meal, they were all but dead at the close.
“Nothing here lives an hour after you pick it,” Isabel dissatisfiedly remarked. “But the quick new buds replace the blossoms almost in a breath. I am glad I have no children, to crowd me out. I like the flowers of Europe. You can wear them all day and then keep them on in water. Life is longer over there. Here we have only our hour. But such an hour! Take you and me at thirty-five! You will be young—a cold storage sort of youth—and I, well, it is written in the stars and the heart of the Green God where I shall be—but I shall have lived, oh, very splendidly little Atlas, while you will only have drawn breath.”
After luncheon she put on a négligé of lustrous silk and flung herself on a couch, her splendid black Malay hair loosened about her, a cigarette in her lips.
“There is a water carnival at the Palace to-morrow night, and the question of your costume must be settled at once. It is late, and all the tailors are over-crowded with orders. I am afraid too that I may not be able to get you into a boat. I might take you in my float, but that would necessitate darkening you up, and it would not do to obscure your little ray of light.
“You might be gotten up as Saturn, with filmy rings. But the nebulæ would prevent you from dancing. I have it! You shall be a Pleiad. I have seen a picture of them leaning over the edge of the world, out of the mists of the sky, and you look like that! You can be a Pleiad quite conveniently, too, with folds of moonlight mist, some sandals, and a star. It only involves buying a roll of gauze from an East Indian. I have a star among my things, and we can find some sandals.
“And now—” she urged, laying lightly compelling fingers on Julie’s arm, “tell me about it! Tell me everything that took place down there—and afterwards, forget it forever. There are no memories in Scheherezade’s city.”