She sank by the bed, pitifully rubbed her cheek against the silk

comforter that was primly awaiting her commands at the foot of the bed,

and cried, "Oh, four-posters are necessary! I can't give them up! I

won't! They---- No one has a right to ask me." She mentally stamped her

foot. "I simply won't live in a shack and take in washing. It isn't

worth it."

A bath, faintly scented, in a built-in tub in her own marble bathroom. A

preposterously and delightfully enormous Turkish towel. One of Eva

Gilson's foamy negligées. Slow exquisite dressing--not the scratchy

hopping over ingrown dirt, among ingrown smells, of a filthy

small-hotel bedroom, but luxurious wandering over rugs velvety to her

bare feet. A languid inspection of the frivolous colors and curves in

the drawings by Bakst and George Plank and Helen Dryden. A glance at the

richness of the toilet-table, at the velvet curtains that shut out the

common world.

Expanding to the comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew

on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a

dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she

sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the

texture of corduroy that scored her palms from holding the steering

wheel.

Yes, she was glad that she had made the experiment--but gladder that she

was safely in from the long dust-whitened way, back in her own world of

beauty; and she couldn't imagine ever trying it again. To think of

clumping out into that world of deliberate and brawling crudeness---Of one Milt Daggett she didn't think at all.

Gorgeously sleepy--and gorgeously certain that by and by she would go,

not to a stingy hotel bed, with hound-dog ribs to cut into her tired

back, but to a feathery softness of slumber--she wavered down to the

drawing-room, and on the davenport, by the fire, with Victoria

chocolates by her elbow, and pillows behind her shoulders, she gossiped

of her adventure, and asked for news of friends and kin back East.

Eugene and Eva Gilson asked with pyrotechnic merriness about the "funny

people she must have met along the road." With a subdued, hidden

unhappiness, Claire found that she could not mention Milt--that she was

afraid her father would mention Milt--to these people who took it for

granted that all persons who did not live in large houses and play good

games of bridge were either "queer" or "common"; who believed that their

West was desirable in proportion as it became like the East; and that

they, though Westerners, were as superior to workmen with hard hands as

was Brooklyn Heights itself.

Claire tried to wriggle out from under the thought of Milt while, with

the Gilsons as the perfect audience, she improvised on the theme of

wandering. With certain unintended exaggerations, and certain not quite

accurate groupings of events, she described the farmers and cowpunchers,

the incredible hotels and garages. Indeed they had become incredible to

her own self. Obviously this silken girl couldn't possibly take

seriously a Dlorus Kloh--or a young garage man who said "ain't."




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