Part 19 (1/2)

The room had emptied, and Alex saw Queenie deliberately glance over her shoulder, as though to make sure of being un.o.bserved. Her eyes moved unseeingly across Alex and Maurice Goldstein. The rest of the room was empty. With a little half-shrug of her white shoulders she delicately took a cigarette from the case that the diplomat was eagerly proffering.

It was the first time that Alex had seen a woman with a cigarette between her lips. She felt herself colouring hotly, as she watched, with involuntary fascination, Queenie's partner carefully lighting the cigarette for her, his hand very close to her face.

She dared not look at Goldstein. The cheap vulgarity of Queenie's display of modern freedom shocked her sincerely, nor could even her inexperience blind her to the underlying motive governing Queenie's every gesture.

She fumbled hastily for her fan and gloves.

”Shall we come upstairs again?” she asked in a stifled voice.

Goldstein rose without a word.

Alex, venturing to cast one glance at him, saw that his face had grown white.

As he took her back to Lady Isabel, he spoke in a quick, low, dramatic voice between clenched teeth:

”You saw? She knows she is driving me frantic; but after this--it's all over.”

Alex was frightened and yet exultant at playing even a secondary role in what seemed to her to be a drama of reality.

An hour later, sitting, for the time being partnerless, beside her mother, she saw Queenie re-enter the ballroom, followed by the Dane.

Queenie's widely-set eyes were throwing a glance, innocent, appealing, the length of the long room. At once her eyelids dropped again. But in that instant Maurice Goldstein had left the wall against which he had been leaning, listless and sulky-looking, and was making his way through the lessening crowd.

Alex, wondering, saw him reach the side of the tall, white-clad figure, and claim her from the young diplomat.

He gravely offered Queenie his arm, and Alex saw them no more that night. She herself drove home to Clevedon Square beside Lady Isabel with her mind in a tumult.

She felt that for the first time she had seen love at close quarters, and although a faint but bitter regret that the experience had not been a personal one underlay all her sensations, she was full of excitement.

”No more late nights after this week,” said Lady Isabel, her voice sleepy. ”A rest will do you good, Alex. You are losing your freshness.”

Alex scarcely listened. She stood impatiently while the weary maid, whose duty it was to sit up for her mistress's return, undid the complicated fastenings of her frock, and took the pins out of her hair.

”I'll brush it myself,” said Alex hastily. ”Good-night, mother.”

”Good-night; don't come down till lunch-time, Alex--we are not doing anything.”

Alex carried her ball dress carefully over her arm and went up one more flight of stairs to her own room, wrapped in her pink dressing-gown, and with her hair loose on her shoulders.

Sitting on the edge of her bed and gazing at her own reflection in the big, swinging mirror, she made personal application of the small fragment of human drama that she had just witnessed.

What man would speak and think of her as Maurice Goldstein spoke and thought of Queenie Torrance?

When would any man's ardent glance answer hers; any man make his way to her through a crowd in response to the silent summons of her eyes?

She fell into one of the idle, romantic dreams evoked by a highly-strung imagination, untempered by any light of experience. But the hero of the dream was a nebulous, shadowy figure of fiction. No man of flesh and blood held any place in the slender fabric of her fancies.

It occurred to her, more with a sense of disconcertment than of that panic which was to come later, that she did not possess the power of drawing any reality from her communion with others, and that no intimacy other than one of the surface had as yet ever resulted from any intercourse of hers with her fellow-creatures. Her nearest approach to reality had been that one-sided, irrational adoration of her schooldays for Queenie Torrance, that had met with no return, and with so much and such universal condemnation.