“Because every man in Santa Barbara,” Julia Crosby went on, “has at one time or another——”
“Run after her? Oh!” Disgust was in the last little word. Mrs. Gueste understood it all in a moment. “She’s that sort. Is she pretty?”
“Stunning! Overwhelming!” said Mrs. Crosby, generously. She herself was little and indefinite.
“M-m-m! So poor Wallie is overwhelmed?” Lillian mused. “Julie, why didn’t you let me know sooner?”
“But, my dear girl, it was all so vague! Even now I don’t know that there’s anything—but there was getting to be such talk!”
“But you think he’s serious?” Mrs. Gueste’s smile was deprecating.
“I don’t know. That’s why I telegraphed. I knew you would.” Her eyes roved anxiously down the beach, and suddenly fixed. “There they are now,” she said, with a small, sharp excitement.
Lillian Gueste started, peered under her pink parasol. Some dozen rods distant the plaza and the beach below it fluttered with the moving colors of a crowd. Between the plaza and the bath houses lay an empty space of beach, and down that glittering white perspective came a horse with a light sulky. They could make out two people in it: a man, holding on his hat; a woman bareheaded, driving—driving so that one wheel of the sulky spun the foam of the receding water. The man was Wallie—Wallie laughing, hugely enjoying it.
Still at a little distance the sulky stopped; the driver gave the reins to her escort, and sprang out with the light, certain leap of a cat. An indifferent Englishman, who had noticed nothing before, put his glass in his eye and stared. It may be he had never seen anything so tawny, so glistening, so magnificent, as the undulant masses of hair gathered up on the crown of the girl’s head. A long tan-colored ulster, the collar turned up around her throat, fell to her feet. She stood pulling off a pair of red gloves, looking up and laughing to Walter Carter, who got out with his habitual lazy lurch.
The two were near the narrow plank that led from the women’s bath houses. Bathers were coming out in bathrobes, which, five steps from the door, they left hanging on the rope, while they hopped, high-shouldered and shivering, down the beach. The girl kicked off her tennis shoes and handed them to Walter, stripped off her ulster, and stood out in a scarlet bathing dress that, covering the knees, left bare legs, slim, brown and dimpled as a child’s. She lingered across the interval of dry sand, calling over her shoulder to Walter something that left him a-grin with amusement; then went joyously down the dip of the beach for the rush of the incoming breakers, and launched into it with the swash of a little, launching ship. The lawlessness of it was beyond any words Lillian knew.