“No. But I like to have people here—the people I like, I should say. That’s why I fixed up the second floor—for parties like this one. There’s a fully equipped kitchen at the back. And here’s my banquet hall.”
The short corridor ended in the room of the three windows. They might have been entering an Italian Villa. Paneled oak stretched straight to the ceiling. At either end yawned a marble fireplace with logs sputtering the faint scent of fir. A refectory table, with couch the color of purple grapes backed against it fronted one. Drawn close to the other stood two old Medici chairs. On both mantels and smaller tables were candlesticks with thick yellow candles. The silver set for supper on the long table gleamed under the glow of branching candelabra.
[303]
] Cunningham watched Nancy’s face as she paused in the doorway. Her eyes had dreams in them.
“Makes a great stage setting for you,” he whispered. “I’ll want you here all the time now.”
A manservant passed cigarettes. They sat and chatted while they waited for the other guests, Mr. and Mrs. Courtleigh Bishop and several friends who were coming in from the Opera. Nancy was in a chair by the fire; Lilla nested in the couch depths, her somber gaze lidded as if heavy with secrets, following her host; and Thorne springing up every now and then to wander about the room, examining its treasures.
Lilla watched and listened to the others, much as she watched and absorbed every word of the director at rehearsals. She had advanced by wits rather than wit and was clever enough to know the value of silence. Only when Cunningham brought her the spray of orchids he had supplied for each of the women did she look up from under thick lids.
“You do everything just right,” she murmured, pinning them into the orange chiffon at her waist, “and I guess never anything wrong.”
In her somnolent eyes was an obvious dare to which several weeks ago Cunningham would probably have responded. Now he smiled down amusedly at the round soft form sunk in the couch cushions and went back to Nancy. The somnolent eyes went after him.
They persuaded Thorne who, unlike a number of writing men, hated to talk about himself, to tell the plot of his new play.
[304]
] “I’ve tackled a big problem,” he said. “Woman’s rights in love!”