Part 31 (1/2)

Leighton stood with folded arms, frowning at the floor. Vi looked up at him but could not catch his eye. She rose, picked up her wraps, and then came and stood before him. She laid her fingers on his arms.

”Grapes,” she said, still without a drawl, ”you _have_ helped me--a lot.

Good night.” She held up her lips.

”No, Vi,” said Leighton, gravely. ”Just give up paying even for kindness with a kiss.”

Vi nodded her head.

”You're right; only--that kiss wouldn't have been as old as I.” She turned from him. ”I don't think I'll call you 'Grapes' any more.”

”Yes, you will,” said Leighton. ”We're born into one name; we earn another. We've got a right to the one we earn. You see, even a man can't have his cake----”

But, with a wave of her hand, Vi was gone. Leighton heard Nelton running down the stairs to call a cab for her.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

Mlle. Folly Delaires was not born within a stone's throw of the Paris fortifications, as her manager would have liked you to believe, but in an indefinite street in c.o.c.kneydom, so like its mates that, in the words of Folly herself, she had to have the homing instinct of a pigeon to find it at all. Folly's original name had been--but why give it away?

She was one of those women who are above and beyond a name--of a cla.s.s, or, rather, of a type that a relatively merciful world produces sparingly. She was all body and no soul.

From the moment that Lewis kissed Folly, and then kissed her several times more, discovering with each essay depths in the art which even his free and easy life had never given him occasion to dream of, he became infatuated--so infatuated that the following dialogue pa.s.sed over him and did not wake him.

”Why are you crying?” asked Lewis, whom tears had never before made curious.

”I'm crying,” gasped Folly, stamping her little foot, ”because it's taken so _long_!”

Lewis looked down at her brown head, buried against his shoulder, and asked dreamily:

”Are you spirit and flower, libertine and saint?”

To which Folly replied: ”Well, I was the flower-girl once in a great hit, and I played 'The Nun' last season, you remember. As for spirits, I had the refusal of one of the spirit parts in the first ”Blue Bird”

show, but there were too many of them, so I turned it down. I'd have felt as though I'd gone back to the chorus. Libertine,” she mused finally--”what _is_ a libertine?”

Lewis's father could have looked at Folly from across the street and given her a very complete and charming definition for a libertine in one word. But Lewis had not yet reached that wisdom which tells us that man learns to know himself last of all. He did not realize that your true-born libertine never knows it. Whatever Folly's life may have been, and he thought he had no illusions on that score, he seized upon her question as proving that she still held the potential bloom of youth and a measure of innocence.

To do her justice, Folly was young, and also she had asked her question in good faith. As to innocence--well, what has never consciously existed, causes no lack. Folly's little world was exceedingly broad in one way and as narrow in another, but, like few human worlds, it contained a miracle. The miracle was that it absolutely satisfied her.

She dated happiness, content, and birth itself from the day she went wrong.

She had the appearance of being frank, open, and lovable, just as she had that appearance of culture which every woman of her type gets from the cultivated cla.s.s of men they prey upon. Pet her, and she murmured softly in the king's best English: scratch her, and, like the rock that Moses struck, she burst forth in a surprising torrent. Without making others merry, she was eternally merry. Without ever feeling the agony of thirst, she instilled thirst. A thousand broken-hearted women might have looked on her as an avenging sword, if the sword hadn't been two-edged.

She had a motto, a creed, a philosophy, packed into four words: ”Be loved; never love.”

If both parts of this creed had not been equally imperative, Lewis might have escaped. His aloofness was what doomed him. Like all big-game hunters, Folly loved the rare trophy, the thing that's hard to get. By keeping his distance, Lewis pressed the spring that threw her into action. Almost instinctively she concentrated on him all her forces of attraction, and Folly's forces of attraction, once you pressed the spring, were simply dynamic. Beneath that soft, breathing skin of hers was such store of vitality, intensity, and singleness of purpose as only the vividly monochromatic ever bring to bear on life.

Lewis, unconsciously in very deep waters indeed, reached London in a state of ineffable happiness. Not so Folly. Lewis had awakened in her desire. With her, desire was merely the prelude to a natural consummation. Folly was worried because one of the first and last things Lewis had said to her was, ”Darling, when will you marry me?” To which she had replied, but without avail, ”Let's think about that afterward.”

When Lewis reached the flat on a Sat.u.r.day night, he did not have to tell his father that something wonderful had happened. Leighton saw it in his face--a face suddenly become more boyish than it had ever been before.