Palla lifted her brown eyes: “I can’t talk about it yet,” she said so simply that Helen’s sixth sense, always alert for information from the busy, invisible antennæ, suddenly became convinced that there were no more hidden depths to explore––no motives to suspect, no pretense to expose.
Day after day she chose to seat herself between Palla and Leila Vance; and the girl began to fascinate her.
There was no effort to please on Palla’s part, other than that natural one born of sweet-tempered consideration for everybody. There seemed to be no pretence, no pose.
Such untroubled frankness, such unconscious candour were rather difficult to believe in, yet Helen was now convinced that in Palla these phenomena were quite genuine. And she began to understand more clearly, as the week wore on, why her son might have had a hard time of it with Palla Dumont before he returned to more familiar pastures, where camouflage and not candour was the rule in the gay and endless game of blind-man’s buff.
“This girl,” thought Helen Shotwell to herself, “could easily have taken Jim away from Elorn Sharrow had she chosen to do so. There is no doubt about her charm and her goodness. She certainly is a most unusual girl.”
But she did not say this to her only son. She did not even tell him that she had met his girl in black. And Palla had not informed him; she knew that; because the girl herself had told her that she had not 178 seen Jim for “a long, long time.” It really was not nearly as long as Palla seemed to consider it.
Helen lunched with Leila Vance one day. The former spoke pleasantly of Palla.
“She’s such a darling,” said Mrs. Vance, “but the child worries me.”
“Why?”
“Well, she’s absorbed some ultra-modern Russian notions––socialistic ones––rather shockingly radical. Can you imagine it in a girl who began her novitiate as a Carmelite nun?”