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If I'd written a story and had it accepted by that magazine I'd read it from the housetops." Gora read the story well enough, and Alexina's mind did not wander even to Gathbroke. It was written in a pure direct vigorous English. A little less self-consciousness and it would have been distinguished.
And although Gathbroke almost frowned at this fresh reminder of the callow years of the girl whose sheer loveliness had haunted his imagination, he went off with a not disagreeable titillation of the nerves, at Mrs. Abbott's suggestion, to find her in the park and bring her back to luncheon in half an hour.
As she did so she caught sight of herself in the mirror and wondered absurdly why she should have kept all her hair and lost so much of her face. She looked more top-heavy than ever. Her face was a small oblong, her eyes out of all proportion. She thought herself hideous. She had heard two hours before that Gathbroke was in Paris attached to the British Commission.
How Alexina knew all this after less than three hours' association with Gathbroke, let any woman answer. She was not so foolish as to imagine herself the victim of a secret passion, or that she had ever loved the man, or ever would. She had merely had her chance for the great duodrama, and thrown it away for a callow dream.
Only she hoped to heaven that Gathbroke was not serious about Gora. She wished never to be reminded of his existence again. And, as Aileen talked of Santa Barbara, she wondered vaguely why there was not a law forbidding girls to marry until they were well into their twenties....until they had had a certain amount of experience....knew their own minds....Maria had been right....
Only too thankful it isn't a box, or to sit down at all. Try one of mine? Don't you feel well?" "I've a rotten headache." "Oh...mind my smoking?" "Not a bit. What did you have to tell me?" "Well, 'way back in ancient times, B.W., nineteen hundred and six, a young Englishman named Gathbroke came to California after his sister, who was ill." She was blowing rings and did not see Gora's face.
The little head was held high on the long white stem of the throat; and the pose, with the dropping eyelids, gave her, in that deep shade, the illusion of maturity. Gathbroke realized that he saw her for the moment as she would look ten years hence. Even the full curved red lips were closed firmly and once the nostrils quivered slightly.
Abbott might already have achieved the mahogany tints of her mother and she would have been regarded as enthusiastically by two hot and dusty men. "Of course you will stay to luncheon," she said as naturally as she had said it these many years, and as two hospitable generations had said it on that verandah before her. She turned to young Gathbroke with a smile, for Mrs.
That had been a last flicker of romance at the embassy...a last resurgence of the evil the war had done her, as she sat in her cold room...a last blaze of sheer femininity when she discovered that Gora had come to Paris in search of Gathbroke....
That rather low Florentine cabinet in the back parlor would just fit in this corner...." She gave a little girlish exclamation and ran forward. "Isn't that young Gathbroke, who was out here at the time of the earthquake and fire...or an older brother, perhaps?" She had taken the photograph from the mantel and was examining it under one of the lanterns.
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