Part 71 (1/2)

Persis hesitated, breathing hard with enormous excitement over so small a matter. While she hesitated an Italian duke who had been a little too gracious in London approached her like an erect cobra. Her skin crawled at his manner. Yet he had no worse motive than she was dallying with.

Before she could exquisitely make it clear to him that with all due deference she despised him, she saw Senator Tait hurrying toward Forbes, greeting hastily those who stopped him and thredding the increasingly mucilaginous crowd till he reached Forbes' side. Then the two men made their way out beyond the intervening ma.s.s.

Persis went back into the house and danced with the Italian duke what he called ”_il trotto alla turca_.” She was so distraite that she never knew how well he made love and how badly he danced.

Later she happened upon the surrept.i.tious Stowe Webb, and learned that Senator Tait and Forbes were leaving Paris in the morning to take the waters somewhere--Vichy, Carlsbad, Marienbad, or Matlock; he was not sure where.

Now Persis regretted her hesitation. She had wasted a precious opportunity to warm her chilled soul with a word from the beloved lips and a look from the eyes and a pressure of the hand that were dearer than any other in the world to her.

She was amazed at her own ability to suffer so much from the loss of so little. She felt an impulse to be alone with her anguish, to huddle over the hearth where the ashes could at least remind her of how warm and cozy she once had been.

She sent for Willie, and he came with a slight elevation of manner which showed that he had found some one to arrange him at least one Scotch-and-soda.

He was demonstrative in the car and very affectionate in the elevator at the Hotel Meurice, where they were stopping. This did not endear him to Persis.

His man exchanged a glance with her maid as they peeled off their wraps.

When man and maid had been sent to bed Willie came shuffling into Persis' dressing-room where she sat staring at her doleful beauty in the mirror. He saw how listless she was, and was awkwardly eager to cheer her up. He could not have depressed her more than by trying to cheer her up. Even he realized his failure eventually and yawned sonorously:

”We're married, and I suppose we've got to stay married--for a while, at least. But I hate to see you unhappy. It's an awful slam on me to have you so blue before the honeymoon is really begun.”

”Don't worry any more, Willie,” she said, gently. ”I suppose I'm just like a child on Christmas afternoon. I always used to get blue after I'd looked over all the presents and broken most of my toys--and grown tired of the others--and eaten too much candy. And I thought, 'So this is the Christmas I've waited for the whole year long! It doesn't amount to much. I've had all that money can buy--and--and I'm too tired to sleep.'”

”I used to feel like that, too,” he said. ”And I remember that I usually turned back to some cheap old toy; usually it was a little lead soldier--my first love.”

”First love!” she murmured.

He tried to shake off gloom as a wet spaniel shakes off water.

”Oh, I say, Persis, buck up! Don't feel like this. You're so beautiful; you're simply ripping to-night.” He laid his hand on her bare arm. She started at his touch and before she realized it gasped, ”Please don't paw me.”

He stared at her, aghast: ”Do you hate me as much as that?”

”Oh, I don't hate you, Willie! It's myself I hate,” Persis cried. ”You mustn't mind me; I'm just a little blue and lonely.”

He laughed gruesomely. ”Bride and groom together on honeymoon, and both terribly lonely! Gad! I wonder if other married couples come to feel this way when the honeymoon turns to green cheese. And do they just bluff it through? It reminds me of that chap in Hogarth's _Mariage a la Mode_, where the wife is yawning and the husband is sunk back in his chair in a dismal stupor. Only he was drunk--I think I'll get drunk.”

He stumbled out to find his usual nepenthe. When he came back her door was locked.

CHAPTER LVI

Persis sat in grim communion with her image for hours. She faintly heard her husband's tapping on her door, and calling through it at intervals in thicker and thicker speech. But it was like a far-off rumor from a street. She was in session with herself.

She took her boudoir cap from her hair, and sat in the cascade of it peering through as from a cavern, and smoking always. She was smoking much too much, but she felt a companions.h.i.+p in tobacco. As she held the cap in her hand she thought of Forbes; and the remembrance was so joyous that she vowed to brave the world to get back to him.

But she pondered what the world would say of her, how it had dealt with the others that had openly defied it, and she was afraid. Then she vowed that she would take her love secretly and cleverly. She would hunt for Forbes till she met him and regained him.

Then she pictured how he would look at her when he understood. She imagined him starting back from her as from something abhorrent. She threw a cigarette-stub at her face in the mirror and gasped: ”Pagh!” She could endure anything better than such cheapening of herself in Forbes'