Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Patton, who was a frequent visitor at the house. He never again alluded to the Ibsenesque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and found her curled upon the sofa bent over "Peer Gynt" he laughed and told her to forget what he'd said – that it was all rot.
They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled snow and under a sun which Sally Carrol scarcely recognized. They passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small Teddy bear, and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal appreciation.
"Look! Harry!"
"What?"
"That little girl – did you see her face?"
"Yes, why?"
"It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute!"
"Why, your own face is almost as red as that already! Everybody's healthy here. We're out in the cold as soon as we're old enough to walk. Wonderful climate!"
She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-looking; so was his brother. And she had noticed the new red in her own cheeks that very morning.
Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for a moment at the street-corner ahead of them. A man was standing there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expression as though he were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for coming closer they discovered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion produced by the extreme bagginess of the man's trousers.
"Reckon that's one on us," she laughed.
"He must be Southerner, judging by those trousers," suggested Harry mischievously.
"Why, Harry!"
Her surprised look must have irritated him.
"Those damn Southerners!"
Sally Carrol's eyes flashed.
"Don't call 'em that."
"I'm sorry, dear," said Harry, malignantly apologetic, "but you know what I think of them. They're sort of – sort of degenerates – not at all like the old Southerners. They've lived so long down there with all the colored people that they've gotten lazy and shiftless."
"Hush your mouth, Harry!" she cried angrily. "They're not! They may be lazy – anybody would be in that climate – but they're my best friends, an' I don't want to hear 'em criticised in any such sweepin' way. Some of 'em are the finest men in the world."
"Oh, I know. They're all right when they come North to college, but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch of small-town Southerners are the worst!"
Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip furiously.
"Why," continued Harry, "if there was one in my class at New Haven, and we all thought that at last we'd found the true type of Southern aristocrat, but it turned out that he wasn't an aristocrat at all – just the son of a Northern carpetbagger, who owned about all the cotton round Mobile."
"A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talking now," she said evenly.
"They haven't the energy!"
"Or the somethin' else."
"I'm sorry Sally Carrol, but I've heard you say yourself that you'd never marry – "
"That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin' generalities."
They walked along in silence.
"I probably spread it on a bit thick Sally Carrol. I'm sorry."
She nodded but made no answer. Five minutes later as they stood in the hallway she suddenly threw her arms round him.
"Oh, Harry," she cried, her eyes brimming with tears; "let's get married next week. I'm afraid of having fusses like that. I'm afraid, Harry. It wouldn't be that way if we were married."
But Harry, being in the wrong, was still irritated.
"That'd be idiotic. We decided on March."
The tears in Sally Carrol's eyes faded; her expression hardened slightly.
"Very well – I suppose I shouldn't have said that."
Harry melted.
"Dear little nut!" he cried. "Come and kiss me and let's forget." That very night at the end of a vaudeville performance the orchestra played "Dixie" and Sally Carrol felt something stronger and more enduring than her tears and smiles of the day brim up inside her. She leaned forward gripping the arms of her chair until her face grew crimson.
"Sort of get you dear?" whispered Harry.
But she did not hear him. To the limited throb of the violins and the inspiring beat of the kettle-drums her own old ghosts were marching by and on into the darkness, and as fifes whistled and sighed in the low encore they seemed so nearly out of sight that she could have waved good-by.
"Away, Away,
Away down South in Dixie!
Away, away,
Away down South in Dixie!"
V
It was a particularly cold night. A sudden thaw had nearly cleared the streets the day before, but now they were traversed again with a powdery wraith of loose snow that travelled in wavy lines before the feet of the wind, and filled the lower air with a fine-particled mist. There was no sky – only a dark, ominous tent that draped in the tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of snowflakes – while over it all, chilling away the comfort from the brown-and-green glow of lighted windows and muffling the steady trot of the horse pulling their sleigh, interminably washed the north wind. It was a dismal town after all, she though, dismal.
Sometimes at night it had seemed to her as though no one lived here – they had all gone long ago – leaving lighted houses to be covered in time by tombing heaps of sleet. Oh, if there should be snow on her grave! To be beneath great piles of it all winter long, where even her headstone would be a light shadow against light shadows. Her grave – a grave that should be flower-strewn and washed with sun and rain.
She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train had passed, and of the life there the long winter through – the ceaseless glare through the windows, the crust forming on the soft drifts of snow, finally the slow cheerless melting and the harsh spring of which Roger Patton had told her. Her spring – to lose it forever – with its lilacs and the lazy sweetness it stirred in her heart. She was laying away that spring – afterward she would lay away that sweetness.
With a gradual insistence the storm broke. Sally Carrol felt a film of flakes melt quickly on her eyelashes, and Harry reached over a furry arm and drew down her complicated flannel cap. Then the small flakes came in skirmish-line, and the horse bent his neck patiently as a transparency of white appeared momentarily on his coat.
"Oh, he's cold, Harry," she said quickly.
"Who? The horse? Oh, no, he isn't. He likes it!"
After another ten minutes they turned a corner and came in sight of their destination. On a tall hill outlined in vivid glaring green against the wintry sky stood the ice palace. It was three stories in the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows, and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous transparency of the great central hall. Sally Carrol clutched Harry's hand under the fur robe.
"It's beautiful!" he cried excitedly. "My golly, it's beautiful, isn't it! They haven't had one here since eighty-five!"
Somehow the notion of there not having been one since eighty-five oppressed her. Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peopled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred snow-filled hair.
"Come on, dear," said Harry.
She followed him out of the sleigh and waited while he hitched the horse. A party of four – Gordon, Myra, Roger Patton, and another girl – drew up beside them with a mighty jingle of bells. There were quite a crowd already, bundled in fur or sheepskin, shouting and calling to each other as they moved through the snow, which was now so thick that people could scarcely be distinguished a few yards away.
"It's a hundred and seventy feet tall," Harry was saying to a muffled figure beside him as they trudged toward the entrance; "covers six thousand square yards."
She caught snatches of conversation: "One main hall" – "walls twenty to forty inches thick" – "and the ice cave has almost a mile of – " – "this Canuck who built it – "
They found their way inside, and dazed by the magic of the great crystal walls Sally Carrol found herself repeating over and over two lines from "Kubla Khan":
"It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!"
In the great glittering cavern with the dark shut out she took a seat on a wooded bench and the evening's oppression lifted. Harry was right – it was beautiful; and her gaze travelled the smooth surface of the walls, the blocks for which had been selected for their purity and dearness to obtain this opalescent, translucent effect.
"Look! Here we go – oh, boy!" cried Harry.
A band in a far corner struck up "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!" which echoed over to them in wild muddled acoustics, and then the lights suddenly went out; silence seemed to flow down the icy sides and sweep over them. Sally Carrol could still see her white breath in the darkness, and a dim row of pale faces over on the other side.
The music eased to a sighing complaint, and from outside drifted in the full-throated remnant chant of the marching clubs. It grew louder like some pæan of a viking tribe traversing an ancient wild; it swelled – they were coming nearer; then a row of torches appeared, and another and another, and keeping time with their moccasined feet a long column of gray-mackinawed figures swept in, snow-shoes slung at their shoulders, torches soaring and flickering as their voice rose along the great walls.
The gray column ended and another followed, the light streaming luridly this time over red toboggan caps and flaming crimson mackinaws, and as they entered they took up the refrain; then came a long platoon of blue and white, of green, of white, of brown and yellow.
"Those white ones are the Wacouta Club," whispered Harry eagerly. "Those are the men you've met round at dances."
The volume of the voices grew; the great cavern was a phantasmagoria of torches waving in great banks of fire, of colors and the rhythm of soft-leather steps. The leading column turned and halted, platoon deploys in front of platoon until the whole procession made a solid flag of flame, and then from thousands of voices burst a mighty shout that filled the air like a crash of thunder, and sent the torches wavering. It was magnificent, it was tremendous! To Sally Carol it was the North offering sacrifice on some mighty altar to the gray pagan God of Snow. As the shout died the band struck up again and there came more singing, and then long reverberating cheers by each club. She sat very quiet listening while the staccato cries rent the stillness; and then she started, for there was a volley of explosion, and great clouds of smoke went up here and there through the cavern – the flash-light photographers at work – and the council was over. With the band at their head the clubs formed in column once more, took up their chant, and began to march out.
"Come on!" shouted Harry. "We want to see the labyrinths down-stairs before they turn the lights off!"
They all rose and started toward the chute – Harry and Sally Carrol in the lead, her little mitten buried in his big fur gantlet. At the bottom of the chute was a long empty room of ice, with the ceiling so low that they had to stoop – and their hands were parted. Before she realized what he intended Harry had darted down one of the half-dozen glittering passages that opened into the room and was only a vague receding blot against the green shimmer.
"Harry!" she called.
"Come on!" he cried back.
She looked round the empty chamber; the rest of the party had evidently decided to go home, were already outside somewhere in the blundering snow. She hesitated and then darted in after Harry.
"Harry!" she shouted.
She had reached a turning-point thirty feet down; she heard a faint muffled answer far to the left, and with a touch of panic fled toward it. She passed another turning, two more yawning alleys.
"Harry!"
No answer. She started to run straight forward, and then turned like lightning and sped back the way she had come, enveloped in a sudden icy terror.
She reached a turn – was it here? – took the left and came to what should have been the outlet into the long, low room, but it was only another glittering passage with darkness at the end. She called again, but the walls gave back a flat, lifeless echo with no reverberations. Retracing her steps she turned another corner, this time following a wide passage. It was like the green lane between the parted water of the Red Sea, like a damp vault connecting empty tombs.
She slipped a little now as she walked, for ice had formed on the bottom of her overshoes; she had to run her gloves along the half-slippery, half-sticky walls to keep her balance.
"Harry!"
Still no answer. The sound she made bounced mockingly down to the end of the passage.
Then on an instant the lights went out, and she was in complete darkness. She gave a small, frightened cry, and sank down into a cold little heap on the ice. She felt her left knee do something as she fell, but she scarcely noticed it as some deep terror far greater than any fear of being lost settled upon her. She was alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure. It was an icy breath of death; it was rolling down low across the land to clutch at her.
With a furious, despairing energy she rose again and started blindly down the darkness. She must get out. She might be lost in here for days, freeze to death and lie embedded in the ice like corpses she had read of, kept perfectly preserved until the melting of a glacier. Harry probably thought she had left with the others – he had gone by now; no one would know until next day. She reached pitifully for the wall. Forty inches thick, they had said – forty inches thick!
On both sides of her along the walls she felt things creeping, damp souls that haunted this palace, this town, this North.
"Oh, send somebody – send somebody!" she cried aloud.
Clark Darrow – he would understand; or Joe Ewing; she couldn't be left here to wander forever – to be frozen, heart, body, and soul. This her – this Sally Carrol! Why, she was a happy thing. She was a happy little girl. She liked warmth and summer and Dixie. These things were foreign – foreign.
"You're not crying," something said aloud. "You'll never cry any more. Your tears would just freeze; all tears freeze up here!"
She sprawled full length on the ice.
"Oh, God!" she faltered.
A long single file of minutes went by, and with a great weariness she felt her eyes dosing. Then some one seemed to sit down near her and take her face in warm, soft hands. She looked up gratefully.
"Why it's Margery Lee," she crooned softly to herself. "I knew you'd come." It really was Margery Lee, and she was just as Sally Carrol had known she would be, with a young, white brow, and wide welcoming eyes, and a hoop-skirt of some soft material that was quite comforting to rest on.
"Margery Lee."
It was getting darker now and darker – all those tombstones ought to be repainted sure enough, only that would spoil 'em, of course. Still, you ought to be able to see 'em.
Then after a succession of moments that went fast and then slow, but seemed to be ultimately resolving themselves into a multitude of blurred rays converging toward a pale-yellow sun, she heard a great cracking noise break her new-found stillness.
It was the sun, it was a light; a torch, and a torch beyond that, and another one, and voices; a face took flesh below the torch, heavy arms raised her and she felt something on her cheek – it felt wet. Some one had seized her and was rubbing her face with snow. How ridiculous – with snow!
"Sally Carrol! Sally Carrol!"
It was Dangerous Dan McGrew; and two other faces she didn't know. "Child, child! We've been looking for you two hours! Harry's half-crazy!"
Things came rushing back into place – the singing, the torches, the great shout of the marching clubs. She squirmed in Patton's arms and gave a long low cry.
"Oh, I want to get out of here! I'm going back home. Take me home" – her voice rose to a scream that sent a chill to Harry's heart as he came racing down the next passage – "to-morrow!" she cried with delirious, unstrained passion – "To-morrow! To-morrow! To-morrow!"
VI
The wealth of golden sunlight poured a quite enervating yet oddly comforting heat over the house where day long it faced the dusty stretch of road. Two birds were making a great to-do in a cool spot found among the branches of a tree next door, and down the street a colored woman was announcing herself melodiously as a purveyor of strawberries. It was April afternoon.
Sally Carrol Happer, resting her chin on her arm, and her arm on an old window-seat, gazed sleepily down over the spangled dust whence the heat waves were rising for the first time this spring. She was watching a very ancient Ford turn a perilous corner and rattle and groan to a jolting stop at the end of the walk. See made no sound and in a minute a strident familiar whistle rent the air. Sally Carrol smiled and blinked.
"Good mawnin'."
A head appeared tortuously from under the car-top below.
"Tain't mawnin', Sally Carrol."
"Sure enough!" she said in affected surprise. "I guess maybe not."
"What you doin'?"
"Eatin' a green peach. 'Spect to die any minute."
Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of her face.
"Water's warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carol. Wanta go swimmin'?"
"Hate to move," sighed Sally Carol lazily, "but I reckon so."
Head and Shoulders
I
In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A – excellent – in Cæsar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry.
Two years later while George M. Cohan was composing "Over There," Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on "The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form," and during the battle of Château-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on "The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists."
After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of "Spinoza's Improvement of the Understanding." Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on "German Idealism."
The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts.
He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop.
"I never feel as though I'm talking to him," expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. "He makes me feel as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect him to say: 'Well, I'll ask myself and find out.'"
And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.
To move in the literary fashion I should say that this was all because when way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had come to a bald place in Connecticut and asked of each other, "Now, what shall we build here?" the hardiest one among 'em had answered: "Let's build a town where theatrical managers can try out musical comedies!" How afterward they founded Yale College there, to try the musical comedies on, is a story every one knows. At any rate one December, "Home James" opened at the Shubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow, who sang a song about the Blundering Blimp in the first act and did a shaky, shivery, celebrated dance in the last.
Marcia was nineteen. She didn't have wings, but audiences agreed generally that she didn't need them. She was a blonde by natural pigment, and she wore no paint on the streets at high noon. Outside of that she was no better than most women.
It was Charlie Moon who promised her five thousand Pall Malls if she would pay a call on Horace Tarbox, prodigy extraordinary. Charlie was a senior in Sheffield, and he and Horace were first cousins. They liked and pitied each other.
Horace had been particularly busy that night. The failure of the Frenchman Laurier to appreciate the significance of the new realists was preying on his mind. In fact, his only reaction to a low, clear-cut rap at his study was to make him speculate as to whether any rap would have actual existence without an ear there to hear it. He fancied he was verging more and more toward pragmatism. But at that moment, though he did not know it, he was verging with astounding rapidity toward something quite different.
The rap sounded – three seconds leaked by – the rap sounded.
"Come in," muttered Horace automatically.
He heard the door open and then close, but, bent over his book in the big armchair before the fire, he did not look up.
"Leave it on the bed in the other room," he said absently.
"Leave what on the bed in the other room?"
Marcia Meadow had to talk her songs, but her speaking voice was like byplay on a harp.
"The laundry."
"I can't."
Horace stirred impatiently in his chair.
"Why can't you?"
"Why, because I haven't got it."
"Hm!" he replied testily. "Suppose you go back and get it."
Across the fire from Horace was another easychair. He was accustomed to change to it in the course of an evening by way of exercise and variety. One chair he called Berkeley, the other he called Hume. He suddenly heard a sound as of a rustling, diaphanous form sinking into Hume. He glanced up.
"Well," said Marcia with the sweet smile she used in Act Two ("Oh, so the Duke liked my dancing!") "Well, Omar Khayyam, here I am beside you singing in the wilderness."
Horace stared at her dazedly. The momentary suspicion came to him that she existed there only as a phantom of his imagination. Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters.
This woman had clearly materialized out of Hume. The very froth of her brown gauzy dress was art emanation from Hume's leather arm there! If he looked long enough he would see Hume right through her and then he would be alone again in the room. He passed his fist across his eyes. He really must take up those trapeze exercises again.
"For Pete's sake, don't look so critical!" objected the emanation pleasantly. "I feel as if you were going to wish me away with that patent dome of yours. And then there wouldn't be anything left of me except my shadow in your eyes."
Horace coughed. Coughing was one of his two gestures. When he talked you forgot he had a body at all. It was like hearing a phonograph record by a singer who had been dead a long time.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"I want them letters," whined Marcia melodramatically – "them letters of mine you bought from my grandsire in 1881."
Horace considered.
"I haven't got your letters," he said evenly. "I am only seventeen years old. My father was not born until March 3, 1879. You evidently have me confused with some one else."
"You're only seventeen?" repeated March suspiciously.
"Only seventeen."
"I knew a girl," said Marcia reminiscently, "who went on the ten-twenty-thirty when she was sixteen. She was so stuck on herself that she could never say 'sixteen' without putting the 'only' before it. We got to calling her 'Only Jessie.' And she's just where she was when she started – only worse. 'Only' is a bad habit, Omar – it sounds like an alibi."
"My name is not Omar."
"I know," agreed Marcia, nodding – "your name's Horace. I just call you Omar because you remind me of a smoked cigarette."
"And I haven't your letters. I doubt if I've ever met your grandfather. In fact, I think it very improbable that you yourself were alive in 1881."
Marcia stared at him in wonder.
"Me – 1881? Why sure! I was second-line stuff when the Florodora Sextette was still in the convent. I was the original nurse to Mrs. Sol Smith's Juliette. Why, Omar, I was a canteen singer during the War of 1812."
Horace's mind made a sudden successful leap, and he grinned.
"Did Charlie Moon put you up to this?"
Marcia regarded him inscrutably.
"Who's Charlie Moon?"
"Small – wide nostrils – big ears."
She grew several inches and sniffed.
"I'm not in the habit of noticing my friends' nostrils.
"Then it was Charlie?"
Marcia bit her lip – and then yawned. "Oh, let's change the subject, Omar. I'll pull a snore in this chair in a minute."
"Yes," replied Horace gravely, "Hume has often been considered soporific – "
"Who's your friend – and will he die?"
Then of a sudden Horace Tarbox rose slenderly and began to pace the room with his hands in his pockets. This was his other gesture.
"I don't care for this," he said as if he were talking to himself – "at all. Not that I mind your being here – I don't. You're quite a pretty little thing, but I don't like Charlie Moon's sending you up here. Am I a laboratory experiment on which the janitors as well as the chemists can make experiments? Is my intellectual development humorous in any way? Do I look like the pictures of the little Boston boy in the comic magazines? Has that callow ass, Moon, with his eternal tales about his week in Paris, any right to – "
"No," interrupted Marcia emphatically. "And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me."
Horace stopped quickly in front of her.
"Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently, "Do you just go round kissing people?"
"Why, yes," admitted Marcia, unruffled. "'At's all life is. Just going round kissing people."
"Well," replied Horace emphatically, "I must say your ideas are horribly garbled! In the first place life isn't just that, and in the second place. I won't kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can't get rid of habits. This year I've got in the habit of lolling in bed until seven-thirty – "
Marcia nodded understandingly.
"Do you ever have any fun?" she asked.
"What do you mean by fun?"
"See here," said Marcia sternly, "I like you, Omar, but I wish you'd talk as if you had a line on what you were saying. You sound as if you were gargling a lot of words in your mouth and lost a bet every time you spilled a few. I asked you if you ever had any fun."
Horace shook his head.
"Later, perhaps," he answered. "You see I'm a plan. I'm an experiment. I don't say that I don't get tired of it sometimes – I do. Yet – oh, I can't explain! But what you and Charlie Moon call fun wouldn't be fun to me."
"Please explain."
Horace stared at her, started to speak and then, changing his mind, resumed his walk. After an unsuccessful attempt to determine whether or not he was looking at her Marcia smiled at him.
"Please explain."
Horace turned.
"If I do, will you promise to tell Charlie Moon that I wasn't in?"
"Uh-uh."
"Very well, then. Here's my history: I was a 'why' child. I wanted to see the wheels go round. My father was a young economics professor at Princeton. He brought me up on the system of answering every question I asked him to the best of his ability. My response to that gave him the idea of making an experiment in precocity. To aid in the massacre I had ear trouble – seven operations between the age of nine and twelve. Of course this kept me apart from other boys and made me ripe for forcing. Anyway, while my generation was laboring through Uncle Remus I was honestly enjoying Catullus in the original.
"I passed off my college examinations when I was thirteen because I couldn't help it. My chief associates were professors, and I took a tremendous pride in knowing that I had a fine intelligence, for though I was unusually gifted I was not abnormal in other ways. When I was sixteen I got tired of being a freak; I decided that some one had made a bad mistake. Still as I'd gone that far I concluded to finish it up by taking my degree of Master of Arts. My chief interest in life is the study of modern philosophy. I am a realist of the School of Anton Laurier – with Bergsonian trimmings – and I'll be eighteen years old in two months. That's all."
"Whew!" exclaimed Marcia. "That's enough! You do a neat job with the parts of speech."
"Satisfied?"
"No, you haven't kissed me."
"It's not in my programme," demurred Horace. "Understand that I don't pretend to be above physical things. They have their place, but – "
"Oh, don't be so darned reasonable!"
"I can't help it."
"I hate these slot-machine people."
"I assure you I – " began Horace.
"Oh shut up!"
"My own rationality – "
"I didn't say anything about your nationality. You're Amuricun, ar'n't you?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's O.K. with me. I got a notion I want to see you do something that isn't in your highbrow programme. I want to see if a what-ch-call-em with Brazilian trimmings – that thing you said you were – can be a little human."
Horace shook his head again.
"I won't kiss you."
"My life is blighted," muttered Marcia tragically. "I'm a beaten woman. I'll go through life without ever having a kiss with Brazilian trimmings." She sighed. "Anyways, Omar, will you come and see my show?"
"What show?"
"I'm a wicked actress from 'Home James'!"
"Light opera?"
"Yes – at a stretch. One of the characters is a Brazilian rice-planter. That might interest you."
"I saw 'The Bohemian Girl' once," reflected Horace aloud. "I enjoyed it – to some extent – "
"Then you'll come?"
"Well, I'm – I'm – "
"Oh, I know – you've got to run down to Brazil for the week-end."