Rose MacLeod Part 22

It was rough, remonstrating, he realized immediately, like the mood that engendered it. He was shocked at himself and glad she did not answer.

Instead, she gave him her hand that he might help her over the low wall.

"See," she said, "your grandmother has a light in her room. She is lying in bed reading good books."

"Does she read them to you?"

"A little word sometimes when I go in to say good-night."

"Grannie's a saint."

"Yes, and better. She's a beautiful grannie."

When they stepped into the hall, Peter, under the stress of his inexplicable feeling, turned to look at her. Instantly the eyes of the man and of the artist agreed in an amazed affirmation. The artist in Peter got the better, and gave him authority.

"Wait a minute," he bade her. "Stand there."

She obeyed him, and looked inquiringly yet languidly. The angry man in him told him at once that she could obey because she was indifferent to his reasons for commanding her. Out of that indifference she stood and looked at him, kind, friendly, yet as far from him as the remoter stars.

He stared at her and thought of brush and canvas. Never had he seen a woman so alive. Her eyes, her wayward hair, her very flesh seemed touched with flame. Her lips had softened into a full curve, strange contrast to their former patient sweetness. The pupils of her eyes, distended, gave her face a tragic power. As he gazed, that wild bright beauty seemed to fade. Her eyes lost their reminiscent look and inquired of him sanely. The lips tightened a little. Her languor gave place to a steady poise. Now she shook her head with a pretty motion, as if she cast off memories.

"Do I look nice to-night?" she said kindly, as if she spoke to an admiring boy. "Do you want to paint me?"

Peter turned aside with an exclamation under his breath. He had never, again he told himself, seen a woman so alive, so radiating beauty as if it bloomed and faded while he looked at her. She was beginning to mount the stairs.

"Good-night," she called back to him, with her perfect kindliness.

"Good-night, Peter."

X

Madam Fulton and Billy Stark sat in the library, wrangling.

"I say she'll come," said Madam Fulton.

"I say she won't," replied Billy with a hearty zest. "No woman of self-respect would."

"Maybe she hasn't self-respect."

"Oh, you go 'way, Florrie. Of course she has, any girl as pretty as that."

Madam Fulton looked at him smilingly. There were few left, nowadays, to call her Florrie.

"You see Electra never in the world would have invited her," she continued. "I simply did it, and she had to confirm it or appear like a brute. Electra won't do that. She's willing to appear like a long and symmetrical icicle, but not a brute."

That was it. She had boldly asked Rose to luncheon, and then told Electra she had done it. Now it was fifteen minutes to the time, and the hostess had not appeared. Madam Fulton looked up from her work. There was a laughing cherub in each eye. Her work, let it be said, was no work at all, only a shuttle plying in and out mysteriously, and lyingly doing the deed known as tatting. She usually tied knots and had to begin over; still, as she said, she liked the motion.

"There was a reporter here yesterday," she remarked, watching the effect on Billy.

"The mischief there was! What for?"

"To see me. To ask about the book."

"You didn't talk to him?"

"Oh, yes, I did!"

"What did he ask you?"

"Everything, nearly. He wanted to see the Abolitionist letters I had quoted."

"What did you say?"

"I refused. I told him they were sacred."

"Did he suspect them? Was that his idea?"

"Oh, dear, no! he wanted to reproduce some of the signatures. Then he asked me about my novels."

"What about them?"

"How I used to write them--if the characters were taken from life. I said every time."

"Florrie, what a pirate you are!"

"Then his eyes sharpened up like knives, and he wanted to know about the originals. 'Dead,' I said, 'years and years ago.'"

"You didn't use to be a freebooter, Florrie. You were just a bright girl."

"Of course I didn't. I was walking Spanish then. I was on my promotion.

I always had faith life would do something for me if I'd speak pretty and hold out my tier. I held my tier a great many years and nothing dropped into it. I'm an awful example, Billy, of what a woman can become when she's had no fun. This may seem to you insanity. It isn't. It's the abnormal and monstrous fruit of a plant that wasn't allowed to mature at the right time. I am a mammoth squash."

"What did you tell him about your novels?"

"I told him they weren't written. They wrote themselves. My characters simply got away from me and did things I never dreamed of. I said they were more alive to me than people of flesh and blood."

"Do you suppose he put in all that?"

"I know he did."

"Have you seen the paper?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I haven't dared to look."