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Forthwith the considerate hostess appeared before her guest with a headful of disclosures. She had decided in advance that it would not do to beat about the bush, so to speak; she would come directly to the obnoxious point. They were in Mrs. Odell-Carney's sitting-room. Mr. Odell-Carney was smoking a cigaret on the balcony, just outside the window. Mrs. Rodney did not know that he was there.
Clayton Spencer's eyes rested on Audrey with a smile of amused toleration, on her outrageously low green gown, that was somehow casually elegant, on her long green ear-rings and jade chain, on the cigaret between her slim fingers. Audrey's audacity always amused him. In the doorway she turned and nonchalantly surveyed the room. "For heaven's sake, hurry!" she apostrophized the table.
Then she saw her lighter-gun, lying on the lobby floor beside the chair in which she had gone to sleep. She bent down, casually, and picked it up. She straightened, the little instrument ready in her hand. "This is not a cigaret lighter, but a heatgun," she said flatly. "I'm in charge here, and I say Mr. Kensington is to be permitted to go free.
He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip. "I'm afraid he's rather unhappy. Poor Rod!" "About me?" "About me." "Look here, Toots," he burst out. "I'm playing square with you. I never go anywhere but here. I I'm perfectly straight with you. But every time here I find some of your old guard hanging round.
It was quite the most wonderful meal I had eaten since I quit the Toreador and Bowen J. Tyler's colored chef, who could make pork-chops taste like chicken, and chicken taste like heaven. After dinner I rolled a cigaret and stretched myself at ease upon a pile of furs before the doorway, with Ajor's head pillowed in my lap and a feeling of great content pervading me.
But her attempt at gayety fell flat. She lighted a cigaret from the stand beside her and fell to studying his face. "What's happened to you?" she asked. "There's a change in you, somehow. I've noticed it ever since you came home. You ought to be smug and contented, if any man should. But you're not, are you?" "I'm working hard. That's all. I don't want to talk about myself," he added impatiently.
And he gave a fleeting thought to Graham and his request to go abroad. He had not meant it. It was sheer reaction. But he would talk to Graham. He lighted a cigaret, and getting into bed turned on his reading lamp. Queer how a man could build, and then find that after all he did not care for the achievement. It was the building alone that was worth while.
But ten minutes later, with a man on either side of her, she was sitting at the piano with a cigaret tucked behind her ear, looking distractingly pretty and very gay and singing a slightly indecorous but very witty little French song. Clayton Spencer, cutting in on the second rubber, wondered which of the many he knew was the real Audrey.
Money, probably." "You are all wrong," said Audrey, and lighted a fresh cigaret. "They want different things at different ages. That's why marriage is such a rotten failure. First they want women; any woman will do, really. So they marry any woman. Then they want money. After that they want power and place. And when they've got that they begin to want love."
She is immediately elected "team captain" for the rest of the evening. It is the duty of the "team captain" to provide cracked ice and water, to get ready the two spare bedrooms, to hold Wallie Spencer's hand, to keep Eddie Armstrong from putting his lighted cigaret ends on the piano, and to break up the party as soon as possible.
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