“Silly ass,” said Margot, “I met him in Devonshire. I hate being painted. You’ve never had a portrait done? Dreary. One has to sit and smirk.” She went fluttering a yellow frock up the library to find an ash tray, came back smoking a cigarette, neared Mark’s chair then veered off to pat Carlson’s jaw.
“You used to set like a kitchen stove in one spot for an hour at a time,” Carlson said, “Now you’re all over the place.”
“One has to move about in England to keep warm. Dad, I wrote Ronny Dufford to send you a copy of his play. Ronny’s land poor, you know? It’s made mountains of money but I don’t think he’s half out of debt, yet. Such a nice idiot. He liked Gurdy such a lot. What the deuce an’ all is Gurdy doing in Chicago? Bargin’ about with the pigstickers?”
She shed her mixture of slangs when his broker’s wife came to luncheon. Mark didn’t think it affected that she mainly talked of titled folk to the smart, reticent woman. Mrs. Villay invited her to Southampton before leaving. Margot shook her hair free of two silver combs and shrugged as the front door shut. “I suspect her of being a ferocious snob. Sweet enough, though. Fancy she doesn’t read anything but Benson and the late Mrs. Ward.—Oh, no, Mrs. Ward isn’t late, is she? Simply lamented.”
Mark laughed, “Let’s go talk to Mr. Carlson.”
“You always call him Mister. Just why, darling?”
“Well, he’s forty years older than me, sister. And he made me. He—”
“Tosh! You made yourself! Let’s walk over and see how the Walling’s getting on.”
He wallowed in this warm enchantment for ten days. Margot dismissed herself to Fayettesville on the first breath of heat. He went down to see her established in the gaping adoration of the family. He thought it hard on the Bernamer girls. He had hinted boarding school for these virgins but the Bernamers, trained by moving pictures, were wary. Yet Margot was clearly born to captivate women. He wrote to Gurdy at Lake Forest: “It was nice to see her tone herself down for your grandfather and your mother. I told her she had better not smoke except with your dad in the cowbarn. You kept telling me I must not be shocked. What is there to get shocked at? Young girls are not as prissy as they were when I was a pup.—Hell of a row coming on with the actors. We are trying to keep things quiet but it looks like a strike. But some of the men still think an actor is a cross between a mule and a hog. Letter from Olive Ilden says she is going to Japan pretty soon and will come this way. I see in the London news that Cora Boyle has signed up with the Celebrities and is coming over to be filmed as Camille or The Queen of Sheba. You are wrong about ‘Heartbreak House.’ It is a conversation, not a play. I wish Shaw would do something like Cæsar and Cleopatra again. They start work on the sets for Captain Salvador next week at the studio. Shall have two sets made for the Voodoo scene and try both on the road before we open the Walling.”
Gurdy reflected that it was time to come home. Then he put it off. Lake Forest was pleasant. He was fond of his host. It was prudent to test the pull of this feeling for Margot. The thing augmented now that he couldn’t talk of her. A strict detachment from passion was silly, after all. But he was annoyed with himself as the passage of any tall and blackhaired woman across a lawn would interrupt the motion of his blood. He set his brain tasks, meditated the girl at Fayettesville, hoped that she wouldn’t singe the acute American skin of his young brothers by comments on the national arms. His sisters had probably made their own experiments with cigarettes. They were sensible lasses, anyhow, if given to endless gush about moving pictures. His young host’s sisters, amiable, blond girls were much the same thing, rarified by trips to Europe, suave frocks and some weak topics in the cerebral change. They held Dunsany a fascinating dramatist and thought there was something to be said for communism. Chicago puzzled him with its summer negligence and the candour of its wealth, with the air of stressed vice in the Loop restaurants and the sudden change from metropolis to a country town within the city limits. It seemed absurd that the listless, polished wife of a hundred million dollars should return from Long Island to give a dance in honor of a travelling English poet held lowly in Chelsea, described by Olive Ilden as a derivative angleworm. At this dance he heard of Margot from an unknown woman with whom he waltzed.