“Couldn’t you see anything in her, Tom?” she asked appealingly.
“Only the humpy way she wore that costume and the fact that she’d apparently been crying,” answered Mr. Harmon, who, despite Gloria’s strictures, was a person not devoid of discernment. “She seemed rather a mess to me. What’s the idea, Gloria? Anything I can help in?” Gloria smiled. “It’s like you to want to help. But this is my job. And,” she added to herself, “it’s going to be a real one.”
CHAPTER II
LIGHT and vitality died out of the atmosphere for Darcy, with Gloria’s exit. Divesting herself of the trappings of glory and hope and promise, she resumed her workaday garb. The long mirror, endued with a sardonic personality, watched her with silent but pregnant commentary. She did not wish to look into it. But her will was weak. Hypnotic effluences, pouring from the shining surface, enveloped and drew her. She walked before it and surveyed herself. The effect was worse, by contrast, than she could have imagined.
“Oh, you frump!” she whispered savagely. “You frazzled botch of a frump!”
Glowing ambition faded to dull and hopeless mockery in her disillusioned soul. She made a bitter grimace at the changeling in the glass.
“Imbecile!” said she.
It was a surrender to grim facts. Suddenly she felt extremely languid. The big couch in the peaceful, curtained alcove lured her. She plumped into it higgledy-piggledy and curled up, an unsightly, humpful excrescence upon its suave surface. Within two minutes, worn out by stress of unaccustomed emotions, she was winging her airy way through that realm of sleep wherein happiness is the sure prize of being, and beauty is forever in the eye of the self-beholder.
Dream music crept into her dreams. Clearer and richer it grew until it filled the dreams so full that they burst wide open. The dreamer floated out through the cleft to a realization of the fact that somebody beyond the draperies which secreted her was piping like Pan’s very self, to an accompaniment of strange, lulling, minor chords. She peeped out.
A tall, slender young man in clothes which seemed to Darcy’s still sleep-enchanted eyes to fit him with a perfection beyond artistry, sat at the piano, humming in a melodious undertone a song of which he had apparently forgotten the words. One passage seemed to puzzle him. He repeated the melody several times, essaying various harmonies to go with it, shook his head discontentedly, and dashed away into Gilbert and Sullivan.