She amused him with cryptic remarks about the men and women who came and went, with stories of familiar characters on Broadway, with a touch of cynicism, a touch of pessimism, that lack of faith in human nature which comes with disillusionment in self. But this, young Bill Dixon did not know nor count. He merely tossed up his shaggy head with the deep, long laugh that makes the whole body tingle and begged for more.
She managed to fill his days with joy of her when she was with him, with longing for her when she cleverly denied him her companionship. She was the hundred women to one man which her training had taught her to be, knowing that to him she would thus become the one women. She caught hold of his imagination and twisted and played with it as a cat with a ball of twine, tossing it this way and that but always with paw poised to pounce.
And simultaneously there flared into her own soul an eagerness of which Naomi Stokes had long since counted herself incapable. It was as if that brown-eyed, ardent gaze held her with the same absorbing quality of his arms when they danced. She began to look for it—jealously as if it might escape her.
Meanwhile in a hotel room that was just four walls, another pair of gray eyes, not veiled, not mysterious, watched for him more and more anxiously, saw him less and less frequently. The girl from the West whose first visit to New York was to have opened up a fairyland [144] ]of adventure for her and the boy she loved—the visit they had planned together—found its streets empty caverns at the foot of towering cliffs, saw in hotels and theaters and restaurants to which McConnell and his wife took her night after night in the hope of diverting her, only the possibility, eager yet dreaded, of singling from the crowd the faces of Bill Dixon and the woman who had taken him from her.
She tried to hide her misery from the anxious eyes of her chaperones. But because she was young—a thousand years younger than Naomi—she could not hide it from the one she loved. And her quivering chin, her reproachful reminders of engagements he had overlooked, sent his mind and feet hurrying back to the woman whose red lips and drooping lids thrilled him like the dizzying lights of Broadway, like a draught of wine he had never before tasted.
“Why does a girl think, because you’ve been together all your lives,” he blurted out one night as he and Naomi drove through the jerk and jam of traffic hold-up, “that she has a right to know your comings and goings as if you belonged to her? Good heavens, a fellow can change his mind, can’t he?”
Naomi turned and smiled out of the window at the laughing sparkle of lights. The look, part sphinx, touched her mouth. In the dark he did not see its tinge of satire.
He maintained for a second the silence that is usually accompanied by a bitten cigar or cigarette half-smoked, the silence of irritation. Then he swung about impatiently.
[145]
] “You’re not like that, Naomi! You’d never ask silly questions.”
She leaned over, touched the hand that clenched and unclenched against his knee.