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Alexina's eyes were fixed on them, but she was conscious, too, of a gaze on her, which for all her hot pride and hurt she could not look around and meet. Once, when the sail was shifting and she knew the eyes would, perforce, be concerned therewith, she stole a hurried survey and saw a well-knit figure, quick in its movements, the muscles playing beneath the flannel shirt.
She noted with intense curiosity that his bright color paled and his sparkling hazel eyes darkened with a sudden look of horror; but the spasm of memory passed quickly, and once more he was staring at her with frank capitulation. Alexina's head went up a trifle.
He could have understood "gush," and sentimentalism, but this attitude of which he had neither heard nor read bothered him until one day he had a sudden, flash of enlightenment. "Is it class-consciousness?" He asked the question of Gora, who dropped in upon a class at Alexina's or Aileen's sometimes on a free afternoon, and with whom he was walking down to the trolley car. "Something like that.
The building looked roomy, old-fashioned and reposeful, and Alexina's spirits rose. She gathered up the wraps, Celeste the satchels no one ever looked to Molly to gather up anything and they went in. The place seemed deserted and asleep, but just inside the doorway, where the hall broadened into an office, a man stood looking through a pile of newspapers.
Alexina's gown was a soft white satin that fitted closely and made her look very tall and slim and round, the corsage trimmed with the only color she ever wore. Her hair was done in a classic knot and held with a comb a present from Aileen designed from periwinkles and green leaves and sparkling dew-drops.
"Then we'll stay," he said; which was not brilliant, to be sure, but it was the way in which Mr. Allie said things which made them seem pregnant of many meanings. After that neither of them spoke, yet Alexina's pulses began to beat. The big side yard upon which the steps descended was flooded with moonlight, and a mockingbird was sending forth a trial note or two. And it was June.
She was obliged to look up as she watched Alexina's subtly transfigured face, fascinated. It made her feel even her physical insignificance; the more as she had lost the flesh that had given her short stature a certain majesty. "Oh, life is unjust, unjust." She no longer spoke with bitterness, merely as one forced to state an inescapable fact. "Injustice! The root of all misfortune."
She was still more astonished when she turned from a view of the Latin-seeming roofs of San Francisco from Twin Peaks, to Alexina's face. It looked drawn and desperate. "Well, most of them will fail," she said lightly. "Look at these pictures! That is what is the matter with California too much talent. You must be as individual as a talking monkey to get your head above the crowd.
Therefore he scanned the invitation list earnestly. "She can afford to do the thing as it should be done," he remarked to Harriet. "She? But Austen " Harriet hesitated. "I supposed it was ours, this affair; it seems the least " Austen looked at her. At first he did not comprehend, then he replied with some asperity. "I have so far kept sentiment and business apart in managing Alexina's affairs."
She gazed at Alexina almost wildly. Then she laughed again. "Gay! oh, my great Heaven gay! Then you don't know? I am going to bear him a child and, oh, help me somehow; Alexina, I loathe him." A child, Uncle Austen and Emily a child! A warmth swept out of Alexina's very soul and enveloped her. She knew, and she did not know.
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