They had iced drinks at a sloppy table in a room off the dancing floor. He poured something into her glass from a flask, under the table. She became dreadfully sleepy and wished she were home and in bed. Then the lights around the dancing floor grew suddenly brighter and danced, and every thing was gayer. Dion Delanoy became again a hero, and she knew that she herself was very wicked and beautiful. The cool half of her gave her lips one final curl of scorn and retired to an immense distance. The vague ache of disillusion left her too. She saw herself engaged to Dion Delanoy, giving a theatre party in a box, and afterward taking Jane behind to meet him. He was her hero. He was marvellous. She clung tight to this thought, as if she knew that once she let it go she could not stand him.
And they wandered down to the street and into a taxicab. The drive was a flash and blur of lights, with Dion Delanoy holding her uncomfortably close. The taxicab increased her sense of wickedness, and she thought of a word she had recently added to her vocabulary—“insouciance.” She was convinced that she had a great deal of it, and as for Dion Delanoy, he was magnificent with it. If only the cool and critical half of her would drop behind, and take with her the dim sense of sadness that was so oddly like homesickness.
“Wouldn’t it be perfectly terrible if I should cry?” thought Milly.
The cab stopped in front of a studio building.
“Friend of mine let me have his studio,” murmured Delanoy vaguely. “Let’s go up and start the phonograph.”
Milly hung back.
“I—I ought to go home. It’s getting late.”
He laughed at that, without any particular merriment in his watchful eyes.
“Aw, baby—that’s what you are, baby.”
There was no taunt that could have hurt Milly more deeply. She looked up at him pleadingly, when an incident, small but important, as many small incidents are, occurred. Two markedly elegant young women approached and passed, perfuming the air. They bowed and smiled at Delanoy. He swept off his hat with a gesture nicely combining hauteur and suavity. In the light from the apartment-house doorway he looked for the first time that evening as she had seen him on the stage.