With a little telephoning this was arranged, and Wallie had it all made out just how beautifully he would direct that interview and carry it through. But the direction was reversed at the beginning by so small an incident as a woman’s hat. Not that the hat was, in itself, so slight an affair. Indeed, when Blanche came out to where he waited her, curbing the most impatient horse in Santa Barbara, the hat was the first thing he saw.
It was wide. It was hung about with lace—too much lace. It was covered with pink roses—too many roses. Walter did not quite know what to think of it, but he had a feeling that Lillian would.
As Blanche sprang into the cart with that vigorous, energetic lift of her body in which the muscles seemed always tense with action:
“Where’s that little white, flyaway thing you used to wear?” he ventured.
“Oh, I don’t know—this is a new one. Don’t you like it?”
“Isn’t it a little—large for driving?”
She flushed but smiled. “Not for calling. Now, Wallie, that’s the first time since you met me that you’ve noticed my clothes. I don’t believe you’ve known whether I’ve had any. Is it because you’ve been having ideals put under your nose? Is it”—she laughed, drawing on a pair of extremely long lavender gloves—“because you are afraid your sister won’t approve of my hat, any more than she approved of my legs?”
It was this astonishing freedom of speech, more than the hat, that made him uneasy of the approaching interview. Of course Blanche could say what she liked to him. He understood. But the very idea of her talking that way to Lillian made him shiver.
But Blanche did not talk “that way” to Lillian. There in the Crosby garden, where the magnolias dropped languid petals on the lawn, she was touchingly like a little girl on her good behavior. She tried, with her anxious sweetness, to make Wallie’s sister like her. But Lillian had seen the hat first, and got no further. It was to the hat she talked, and it seemed to Walter that his sister’s costume, so notably discreet, somehow set off all the daring of Blanche Remi’s gown, the telling blacks of which were touched in at the most unexpected intervals. Was Lillian, instead of helping, trying to put Blanche at her worst? He thrust that thought out of sight as disloyal. He sat, wretchedly uncomfortable, trying to remember whether he had ever seen Lillian wear long lavender gloves, hearing Lillian deftly turn and dispose of, unanswered, Blanche Remi’s suggestions for horseback excursions and “plunge parties.”
He expected, with every covert snub, that Blanche would suddenly, diabolically turn tables on her, as he had seen her do with other women. But Blanche, who had always had what she wanted, now, for perhaps the first time in her life, wanted a woman to like her. And it did not occur to her that she should fail in her desire. But what had been her strength was now her failure. Her compelling magnetism alarmed Lillian Gueste. She had been thoroughly convinced at first glance that the girl was “bad form.” But now she felt her force as something terrible and threatening to Wallie. The very sweetness of the smile Blanche gave her in going seemed too rich.