He looked down at the easy movement of the white shoulders under the narrow beaded straps that were the sole support of her black gown.
“Any one with the eyes and arms of Naomi will always count,” he consoled.
She pulled from his gaze.
“Oh, what’s the use! You know I don’t matter to them any more than to you. You play around with me here because you haven’t any better way to pass your time. And they, poor idiots—”
“By Jove, you are off your feed!”
She turned her back on his low, impudent chuckle.
His tolerant eye traveled over the shoulder turned from him to the hot, wild mass clamoring at the doorway. Suddenly he became alert and a second later was on his feet, without apology pushing his way round the dance floor. Naomi saw him make for a man with a big frame and graying mustache who lingered impotently at the rear of the crowd. Kent reached out, grabbed his hand and with absolute disregard of intervening humanity, wrung it as if he never wanted to let it go. She wondered vaguely what it would be like to have some one as glad to see her. He passed a word to the head-waiter. The red velvet rope dropped as if by magic [131] ]and, escorted by Kent, the party was led to a table a few paces from where she sat.
The man glanced about with the curiosity, half amused, half critical of the sight-seeing stranger. Back of him came a girl of twenty-one or so with eager gray eyes a thousand years younger than Naomi’s, white teeth showing through parted lips and hair the dense, dusky black of an Indian’s. At her side walked a young man. As he passed Naomi, their glances met. They locked with that odd, unintentional arresting which means that two out of a vast throng have momentarily become individuals. Naomi’s slow gaze followed as he went on and it seemed to her that in the allotting of places, he deliberately chose the one facing her.
Kent hovered over his friend with beaming enthusiasm. The ironic twitch of his thin lips was gone. The somewhat sagging shoulders of the man who keeps flesh down by massage rather than exercise had straightened. He scribbled his address. He took theirs. He admonished the waiter to treat them well, received that gentleman’s reassuring nod, and apologized finally for having to return to his own table.
Naomi watched the younger man’s face as Marshall Kent sat down beside her. No—she had not been mistaken. She who knew so well how to read men’s eyes saw in his dark ones a look of intense, concentrated interest. The girl next to him saw it, too—and following it, thought she had never seen a face more fascinating than the one so smoothly white with its heavy-fringed lids and wave of glinting hair across the forehead. It was artificial, of course, but then you got used to that [132] ]in New York. Her clear gray eyes went swiftly back to the dark ones that were fastened on Naomi’s.