Part 25 (1/2)
”No such a thing!” she said, as lightly as he.
”It's the nearest _I_ ever came to it!” he averred.
She continued to flit up the terraces before him, her voice rippling with amus.e.m.e.nt dropping down on him through the dusk. ”Well, you'll have to come nearer than that, if you ever want to make a go of it!” she called over her shoulder. Upon which note this very modern conversation ended.
CHAPTER XXIII
MORE TALK BETWEEN YOUNG MODERNS
When they met at dinner, they laughed outright at the sight of one another, a merry and shadowless laugh. For an instant they looked like light-hearted children. The change of Arnold's long sallow face was indeed so noticeable that Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced sharply at him, and then looked again with great satisfaction. She leaned to Sylvia and laid her charming white hand affectionately over the girl's slim, strong, tanned fingers. ”It's just a joy to have you here, my dear.
You're brightening us stupid, bored people like fresh west wind!” She went on addressing herself to the usual guest of the evening: ”Isn't it always the most beautiful sight, Felix, how the mere presence of radiant youth can transform the whole atmosphere of life!”
”I hadn't noticed that my radiant youth had transformed much,”
commented Arnold dryly; ”and Sylvia's only a year younger than I.”
He was, as usual, disregarded by the course of the conversation. ”Yes, suns.h.i.+ne in a shady place ...” quoted Morrison, in his fine mellow tenor, looking at Sylvia. It was a wonderful voice, used with discretion, with a fine instinct for moderation which would have kept the haunting beauty of its intonations from seeming objectionable or florid to any but American ears. In spite of the invariable good taste with which it was used, American men, accustomed to the toneless speech of the race, and jealously suspicious of anything approaching art in everyday life, distrusted Morrison at the first sound of his voice. Men who were his friends (and they were many) were in the habit of rather apologizing for those rich and harmonious accents. The first time she had heard it, Sylvia had thought of the G string of old Reinhardt's violin.
”I never in my life saw anything that looked less like a shady place,”
observed Sylvia, indicating with an admiring gesture the table before them, gleaming and flas.h.i.+ng its gla.s.s and silver and close-textured, glossy damask up into the light.
”It's _morally_ that we're so shady!” said Arnold, admiring his own wit so much that he could not refrain from adding, ”Not so bad, what?”
The usual conversation at his stepmother's table was, as he would have said, so pestilentially high-brow that he seldom troubled himself to follow it enough to join in. Arnold was in the habit of dubbing ”high-brow” anything bearing on aesthetics; and Mrs. Marshall-Smith's conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates of years' standing was for the most part reduced to a primitive simplicity for which a sign-language would have sufficed. Arnold's phrase for the situation was, ”I let Madrina alone, and she don't bother me.” But now, seeing that neither the facade of Rouen, nor the influence of Chardin on Whistler, had been mentioned, his unusual loquacity continued. ”Well, if one west wind (I don't mean that as a slam on Sylvia for coming from west of the Mississippi) has done us so much good, why not have another?” he inquired. ”Why couldn't Judith come on and make us a visit too? It would be fun to have a sc.r.a.p with her again.” He explained to Morrison: ”She's Sylvia's younger sister, and we always quarreled so, as kids, that after we'd been together half an hour the referee had to shoulder in between and tell us, 'Nix on biting in clinches.' She was great, all right, Judith was! How _is_ she now?” he asked Sylvia. ”I've been meaning ever so many times to ask you about her, and something else has seemed to come up. I can't imagine Judy grown up. She hasn't pinned up that great long braid, has she, that used to be so handy to pull?”
Sylvia took the last of her soup, put the spoon on the plate, and launched into a description of Judith, one of her favorite topics.
”Oh, Judith's just _fine_! You ought to see her! She's worth ten of me: she has such lots of character! And handsome! You never saw anything like Judith's looks. Yes, she's put her hair up! She's twenty years old now, what do you _suppose_ she does with her hair? She wears it in a great smooth braid all around her head. And she has _such_ hair, Aunt Victoria!” She turned from Arnold to another woman, as from some one who would know nothing of the fine shades of the subject. ”No short hairs at all, you know, like everybody else, that _will_ hang down and look untidy!” She pulled with an explanatory petulance at the soft curls which framed her own face in an aureole of light. ”Hers is all long and smooth, and the color like a fresh chestnut, just out of the burr; and her nose is like a Greek statue--she _is_ a Greek statue!”
She had been carried by her affectionate enthusiasm out of her usual self-possession, her quick divination of how she was affecting everybody, and now, suddenly finding Morrison's eyes on her with an expression she did not recognize, she was brought up short. What had she said to make him look at her so oddly?
He answered her unspoken question at once, his voice making his every casual word of gold: ”I am thinking that I am being present at a spectacle which cynics say is impossible, the spectacle of a woman delighting--and with the most obvious sincerity--in the beauty of another.”
”Oh!” said Sylvia, relieved to know that the odd look concealed no criticism, ”I didn't know that anybody nowadays made such silly Victorian generalizations about woman's cattiness,--anybody under old Mr. Sommerville's age, that is. And anyhow, Judith's my _sister_.”
”Cases of sisters, jealous of each other's good looks, have not been entirely unknown to history,” said Morrison, smiling and beginning to eat his fish with a delicate relish.
”Well, if Judy's so all-fired good-looking, let's _have_ her come on, Madrina,” said Arnold. ”With her and Sylvia together, we'd crush Lydford into a pulp.” He attacked his plate with a straggling fork, eating negligently, as he did everything else.
”She has a standing invitation, of course,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith.
”Indeed, I wrote the other day, asking her if she could come here instead of to La Chance for her vacation. It's far nearer for her.”
”Oh, Judith couldn't waste time to go visiting,” said Sylvia. ”I've told you she is worth ten of me. She's on the home-stretch of her trained-nurse's course now. She has only two weeks' vacation.”
”She's going to be a trained nurse?” asked Arnold in surprise, was.h.i.+ng down a large mouthful of fish with a large mouthful of wine. ”What the d.i.c.kens does she do that for?”
”Why, she's crazy about it,--ever since she was a little girl, fifteen years old and first saw the inside of a hospital. That's just Judith,--so splendid and purposeful, and single-minded. I wish to goodness _I_ knew what I want to do with myself half so clearly as she always has.”
If she had, deep under her consciousness, a purpose to win more applause from Morrison, by more disinterested admiration of Judith's good points, she was quite rewarded by the quickness with which he championed her against her own depreciation. ”I've always noticed,”