Expanding to the comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the texture of corduroy that scored her palms from holding the steering wheel.
Yes, she was glad that she had made the experiment—but gladder that she was safely in from the long dust-whitened way, back in her own world of beauty; and she couldn't imagine ever trying it again. To think of clumping out into that world of deliberate and brawling crudeness——
Of one Milt Daggett she didn't think at all.
Gorgeously sleepy—and gorgeously certain that by and by she would go, not to a stingy hotel bed, with hound-dog ribs to cut into her tired back, but to a feathery softness of slumber—she wavered down to the drawing-room, and on the davenport, by the fire, with Victoria chocolates by her elbow, and pillows behind her shoulders, she gossiped of her adventure, and asked for news of friends and kin back East.
Eugene and Eva Gilson asked with pyrotechnic merriness about the "funny people she must have met along the road." With a subdued, hidden unhappiness, Claire found that she could not mention Milt—that she was afraid her father would mention Milt—to these people who took it for granted that all persons who did not live in large houses and play good games of bridge were either "queer" or "common"; who believed that their West was desirable in proportion as it became like the East; and that they, though Westerners, were as superior to workmen with hard hands as was Brooklyn Heights itself.
Claire tried to wriggle out from under the thought of Milt while, with the Gilsons as the perfect audience, she improvised on the theme of wandering. With certain unintended exaggerations, and certain not quite accurate groupings of events, she described the farmers and cowpunchers, the incredible hotels and garages. Indeed they had become incredible to her own self. Obviously this silken girl couldn't possibly take seriously a Dlorus Kloh—or a young garage man who said "ain't."
Eva Gilson had been in Brooklyn within the month, and in a passion of remembrance of home, Claire cried, "Oh, do tell me about everybody."
"I had such a good time with Amy Dorrance," said Mrs. Gilson. "Of course Amy is a little dull, but she's such an awfully good sort and—— We did have the jolliest party one afternoon. We went to lunch at the Ritz, and a matinée, and we saw such an interesting man—Gene is frightfully jealous when I rave about him—I'm sure he was a violinist—simply an exquisite thing he was—I wanted to kiss him. Gene will now say, 'Why didn't you?'"
And Gene said, "Well, why didn't you?" and Claire laughed, and her toes felt warm and pink and good, and she was perfectly happy, and she murmured, "It would be good to hear a decent violinist again. Oh! What had George Worlicht been doing, when you were home?"
"Don't you think Georgie is wonderful?" fluttered Mrs. Gilson. "He makes me rue my thirty-six sad years. I think I'll adopt him. You know, he almost won the tennis cup at Long Branch."