Her little artist is a charming blond who doesn't come up to her
shoulders, and Delilah hangs on every word he says. For the moment he
obscures all the other men on her horizon. He made sketches of the way
every room in her house ought to look. And what seems to be the result
of years of formal pleasant living really is the result of the months
of hunting and hard work which he and Delilah have put in. He even
indicates the flowers she shall wear, and those which are to bloom next
summer in her garden. She affects heliotrope, and on the night of her
house-warming she carried a tight bunch of it with a few pink rosebuds.
Really, in her new rôle Delilah is superb. And, people are beginning
to notice her and to call on her. Even in this short time she has been
invited to some very good houses. She has a new way with her eyes, and
drops her lashes over them, and is very still and lovely.
Do you remember her leopard skins of last year? Well, now she wears
moleskins--a queer dolman-shaped wrap of them, and a little hat with a
dull blue feather, and she drapes a black lace veil over the hat and
looks like a duchess.
Grace Clendenning says that Delilah and her artist will achieve a
triumph if they keep on. They aren't trying to storm society, they are
trying to woo it, and out of it the artist gets the patronage of the
people whom he meets through Delilah. Perhaps it will end by Delilah's
marrying him. But Grace says not. She says that Delilah simply
squeezes people dry, like so many oranges, and when she has what she
wants, she throws them aside.
Yet Grace and Delilah get along very well together. Grace has always
made a study of clothes, because it is the only way in which she can
find an outlet for her artistic tastes. And she is interested in
Delilah's methods. She says that they are masterly.
But I am forgetting to tell you what Delilah said of you. It was on
the night of her house-warming. She asked about you, and when I said
that you had gone south to get atmosphere for some stories you were
writing, she said: "Do you know it came to me yesterday, while I was in church, where I
had seen him. It was the same text, and that was what brought it back.
He was preaching, my dear. I remember that I sat in the front pew
and looked up at him, and thought that I had never heard such a voice;
and now, tell me why he has given it up, and why he is burying himself
in the South?"