Star-Dust Part 91

In a soft boudoir of French grays, French doors, cerulean blues, and a litter of every extravagant requisite of the toilet, Lilly faced herself in a cunningly triplicated mirror.

"We're not dressed. We shouldn't have come," trying to ride down her sense of misery.

"I'm dressed in all the cloth of gold you have woven for me," quoth Zoe, in mock grandiloquence, still pitched to her exultant key and in all her youthful capacity for it, full of self.

There were enamel-backed brushes with deep bristles that plowed her hair out into dust of gold, and a finely wrought amber comb which she ran through the fluff, striking an att.i.tude.

"She walks in splendor like the night--"

"Zoe, you're losing your head."

"Splendor! This is me. Marble--terraces--rugs that slide--only I want peac.o.c.ks--that strut--and tails that open like fans and--starlight--him--"

"Who?"

"Silly darling--n.o.body--the world--life."

There was no restraining her. She smoothed her mother's hair only to kiss it awry again. She fluffed a fragrant cloud of powder along her neck. Trilled at a drowsy canary in a wicker cage. Stretched herself in the conscious pose of a Recamier on the lacy mound of a chaise-longue, and finally followed her mother into the drawing-room, entirely at ease in the straight blue frock.

It was a room almost the width of the house, with a balcony at one end hung in a shah's silk prayer rug, and a stone fireplace, out of the Davanziti palace, opposite. Three sets of leaded doors opened out on to a flagged parapet that overlooked the Hudson and beyond the deep purple of perfect September.

They met in a little group at one of these doors, and Lilly noticed gratefully that Mrs. Enlow had thrown a net wrap over the formality of her evening gown and that Bruce had merely changed to flannels.

He smiled at her with that impersonal sort of kindness which could cause such a gush of blood to her heart, and spread himself in a playful salaam before Zoe.

"Princess."

She held out her hand to be kissed, which he did five times, finger by finger.

"These terraces," said Lilly, trying not to be heavy, "are like the setting for an Aegean romance."

He smiled back at her again through the new film across his eyes.

"Write it and I'll produce it."

"Close the doors, d.i.c.ky; it's growing chilly," said Mrs. Enlow.

"Yes," said Lilly, shivering a bit, "chilly."

"And I'm burning, d.i.c.ky, Tickey Tavey," cried Zoe, applying the name audaciously. "How can anyone be chilly on such a night as this?"

"Come, Princess, and I'll show you some stars."

"Don't wander too far before dinner, children. Mrs. Penny and I will sit indoors. Only youth can risk swollen joints."

"Yes," said Lilly, feeling herself rather terrifiedly past the fiercer rush of life, "only youth."

They sat on a great overstuffed divan that faced the parapet, lighted softly at each end by the first lamps of evening.

"Why, you poor child, you're shivering of chill! It's the damp. Let me get you a wrap."

In the thickening silence Lilly sat alone looking out through the gla.s.s doors. Bruce and Zoe were silhouetted out there against a fathomless evening sky that was brilliantly pointed with a few big stars. But they were not gazing out. Her face was up to his like a flower about to be plucked, and, looking down into it, his whole body seemed to sway to its sweetness.

Suddenly the ache in Lilly's heart was laid. With all of her old capacity for the incongruous, but without any of her usual pump of terror, she thought suddenly of her father, two nights hence, sitting down to the creamed salmon and fried potatoes on Page Avenue, hanging his napkin with the patent fasteners about his neck. Edna Shriner must teach her that French-knot st.i.tch for Zoe's gowns--in case--heigh-ho!--in case--

With her gaze on those two etched and eloquent profiles, a piercing sense of achievement seemed to flow with a warm rush of blood, curing her of chill.

Her heart beat high with what even might have been fulfillment.

THE END