"Don't evade. Some of the older crowd look at me as if they thought I was the Scarlet Woman come back to life. I'm not the Scarlet Woman, Bob. Only a dash of pink."
He smiled indulgently.
"It's strange," she mused, "how the tradition of behaviour clings in the blood, in that set. Your set, Bob. Ah, well! Discretion is the better part of virtue, as someone said. And I haven't been discreet, even if I have been virtuous. You believe I've been, don't you, Bob?"
"What, discreet?"
Again she laughed, showing little, even, animal-like teeth.
"No; the other thing."
"I believe whatever you want me to."
"Meaning that you reserve your own opinion. But you're a staunch friend, anyway.... The trouble with me is that I was born too soon. I really belong with this wild young age that's coming on the stage just as I'm going off; with the girls. Listen!"
Below stairs Fentriss, still at the piano, had swung into the rhythms of the Second Rhapsody, wild and broken as white water seething through a rock-beset gorge.