“Well bred!” she concluded dryly, “I know it. The other night, too, I did something that horrified Wicklow. We were dining at Mrs. O’Neal’s; I knelt, and kissed the cardinal’s ring. Wicklow was wild; he seemed to have an A. P. A. nightmare at once. It was all in the New York papers yesterday,” Margaret laughed again, resting her arms on the back of the carved chair where Rose had sat.
Allestree laid down his brushes; he had been working on a sketch of Margaret herself, and, lighting a cigarette, he passed his case to her. She took one mechanically and lit it at his. As the spark flamed up between them, he caught the hollowness of her eyes, the startling pallor of her face.
“What in the world is it, Margaret?” he asked sharply; “you’re ill.”
She turned and looked over her shoulder into the mirror. “Do I look so?” Something she saw in her own image, in the deeply shadowed eyes, the sharpened curve of the cheeks startled her. “What a fright I grow to be! No wonder that Vermilion girl stared. What an Aphrodite she’d make—in French corsets and a trail!” Margaret laughed silently.
Then catching a look on Allestree’s face which she read too easily. “Were you born proper, Bobby?” she said, knocking the ashes from her cigarette, “or did you achieve it, or was it thrust upon you?”
“I can’t paint you in this mood, Margaret,” he said dryly, “you wouldn’t look like yourself; you’d remind me of a malicious elf.”
She leaned her elbow on the chair back again, resting her chin in the hollow of her hand. “There!” she said, “I told William Fox that you’d make me the imp to Rose’s angel.”
“I’d like to make you what you are, a fascinating, wilful woman with no heart at all!” he retorted.
“No heart!” she laughed, tossing her cigarette away; “that’s true, Bobby, I’ve no heart!”
As she spoke she moved over to Rose’s portrait which still rested on an easel in the corner. It was a magnificent piece of work, the artist had dreamed his heart into it; the young head symbolized youth, purity, hope. The figure had the simplicity and loveliness of some beautiful Greek inspiration when the art of Greece was young. Margaret stood looking at it in silence, herself unaware of the sharp contrast between the pictured youth and enthusiasm of this girl and her own slim beauty, her subtly charming and unhappy face, which seemed to have lost that magic touch which is like a breath from the Elysian fields, the presence of belief, of hope, most of all of love. She turned at last and met Allestree’s thoughtful glance. “Bobby,” she said briefly, “you’re a fool.”