Half the night Thurley searched among her possessions, finding and destroying notes from admirers, Dan’s boyish, imploring letters, her own childish diary she had kept the first year in New York, Bliss Hobart’s few mementoes—the crayon sketches Collin had made of her abroad, Ernestine’s letters. She reread her press clipping book, her expense accounts, personal memoranda; she added and deducted figures as if she were a scientific accountant. Then she walked into her clothes room and looked at all the lovely, rainbow things of becoming richness; she opened her jewel case and stared at the glittering bits of beauty within. It was as though she were taking a complete inventory of one Thurley Precore, prima donna.
She undressed herself slowly, never taking her eyes from her image in the glass, plaiting the brown hair into two braids, each as thick as her own arm. Then she rose and quoted quickly the master’s telling command,
“Be sincere—no matter what you may believe,” adding, “so that’s decided—no matter what comes,” startled at the insolent assurance of her eyes. If one could have seen her face as she slept one would have noticed foremost of all that a permanent sneer seemed painted on the scarlet lips.
CHAPTER XXIX
Whatever Lorraine thought concerning Dan’s frequent absences and his attitude regarding his home and what happened therein, she still followed the path of the Victorian era and kept her own counsel. Nor did any one try to disturb her gentle self by the agony of doubts. For one reason the “genteel grafters,” such as Cora, Hazel, Josie and Owen of the art shoppe fame, came to Lorraine’s home only for what advantages could be obtained. Why then disturb her who gave them the advantages? There might be an end of them if they did. To be sure they gossiped among themselves and the societies and lodges with vivid imagination and a generous manner of embellishing a truly innocent but unique situation—a high-minded, spirited man too high for his town yet too undisciplined for the city who haunted the footsteps of a high-minded, spirited woman who had become big enough in abilities for the entire world and who was dying inwardly of ennui and heart-lonesomeness, who took this mild sort of affair as the one genuine and refreshing thing in her hurried, de luxe existence. Neither of these young people realized the harm it incurred. They cheated themselves into believing it “merely palship” or “an expression of individuality”—a very nice sort of garden and not wild oats affair!
Sometimes Thurley met Dan with a zest for his boyish mannerisms, his telling of the rise in wool goods, what a splendid housewife Lorraine was—only she didn’t understand things—how jealous he was of the basso who made love to Thurley on the opera stage. Sometimes she looked at him in disdain, the strange sneer on her lips as she thought of what a dull existence was Dan’s, what a lark it was to see him strive to make as good a showing as the young millionaire who was hopelessly infatuated with this Thurley Precore, boasting at his club that she would wear his necklace or his flowers before the season ended. The vampire which is in all women and which is not a sinister quality only to be raved about as “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,” had for the time being become supreme in Thurley. Dan did not understand this—any more than he understood why he was unhappy when he was near Thurley and always thinking about Lorraine and why, when he returned home, fortified a thousand times by the blessed memories of Thurley’s beauty and the stolen moments he had claimed, he was unhappier still.
Dan would return to his immaculate, prosaic living-room where Lorraine would greet him and inform him all in the same breath that Lydia Hoyt was engaged and Lorraine would give a kitchen shower—and did Dan notice how the veranda posts sagged, hadn’t he better have a man come up and see about them?—oh, yes, there was something wrong with her car, well—she had let Owen drive it because he had deliveries to make ’way out in the country—beefsteak was three cents higher a pound than last week and two of the church deacons had resigned because they couldn’t have their way about the music.
After which Dan would slip away to unpack his bag and Lorraine to prepare his supper. There would be an abundant, well cooked meal on the prosaic table with its nightmares of hand painted peppers and salts and cut glass monstrosities, the water pitcher heavily banded with gilt. After eating his fill, Dan would depart to smoke in peace and wonder what Lorraine would think of Thurley’s new frocks and the baskets of flowers which forever adorned her rooms, of the bizarre friends and their weird ways—he would end, however, with the somewhat hopeless consolation that Lorraine had about as much imagination or capacity for artistic enjoyment as the old lady who, upon seeing mountains for the first time, merely said querulously,