Louis Vance - Linda Lee, Incorporated - A Novel

But in the understanding of Fanny Lontaine, accustomed to admiration as she was, and no stranger to the public life of European capitals, the flutter caused by the passage of her companions through a phase of existence so polite and skeptical conferred upon them an unmistakable cachet. She had been long abroad and out of touch, she had never been on intimate terms with New York ways, but the busy mind at work behind her round eyes of a child was like a sponge for the absorption of delicate nuances and significant signs of all sorts. Life had made it like that.

Six years married, and two years older than Lucinda Druce, Fanny retained, and would till the end, whatever life might hold in store for her, a look of wondering and eager youthfulness. Romance trembled veritably upon her lashes. She had a way of holding her lips slightly apart and looking steadily at one when spoken to, as if nothing more interesting had ever been heard by the ears ambushed in her bobbed, ashen hair. Her eyes of a deep violet shade held an innocence of expression little less than disconcerting. Her body seemed never to have outgrown its adolescence, yet its slightness was quite without any angularity or awkwardness, it achieved roundness without plumpness, a stroke of physical genius. In the question of dress she showed a tendency to begin where the extreme of the mode left off, a fault held venial in view of her apparent immaturity. And then, of course, she had lived so long in England, where people are more broad-minded…

Apparently not talkative but a good listener, she had a knack of making what she did say stick in memory, not so much for its content as for its manner, a sort of shy audacity that pointed observations often racy and a candour sometimes devastating. But unless one happened to be looking at Fanny when she spoke, her remarks were apt to seem less memorable, her humour less pungent.

"It's heavenly," she now declared, coolly staring at their neighbours through the smoke of her cigarette – "simply divine to be home. I'm sure I'd never want to see Europe again if it weren't for Prohibition."

"You're not going to suffer on that account today," Jean Sedley promised, producing from her handbag a little flash of jewelled gold.

"But I shall!" Fanny protested with tragic expression. "It's the frightful hypocrisy that's curdling my soul and ruining my insides. It makes one homesick for England, where people drink too much because they like it, and not to punish themselves for electing a government which conscientiously interprets the will of the people – and leaves them to interpret their wont."

"No dear, thanks." Smilingly Nelly Guest refused to let Jean fill her glass.

"The figure?" Jean enquired in deep sympathy.

"I've positively got to," Nelly sighed. She cast a rueful glance down over her plump, pretty person. "Compassionate Columbia simply must not waddle when she pokes her horn of plenty at famine-stricken China."

"Oh, that wretched pageant!" Lucinda roused from a lapse into communion with the Lucinda who made an unseen fifth. "When is it? I'd forgotten all about it." Nelly Guest named a day two weeks in the future. "And I haven't even thought about my costume! Oh, why do we punish ourselves so for Charity's sweet sake?"

"Because deep down in our hearts we all like to parade our virtues."

"Much virtue in that plural," Nelly Guest commented.

"Well, I don't like parading mine in pageants, I assure you."

"Don't you, honestly, Cindy?" Fanny asked. "I should think you'd love that sort of thing. You used to be perfectly mad about acting."

"So is every woman – isn't she? – at one stage or another of her life convinced she's truly a great actress cheated out of her birthright."

"I know. All the same you know you've got talent. Don't you remember our open-air performance of Much Ado About Nothing ? You were a simply ravishing Rosalind."

"Heavens! What do amateur theatricals prove?"

"For one thing," Jean Sedley commented, "how long-suffering one's friends can be."

"And one's enemies. Consider what they sit through just to see us make public guys of ourselves."

"Well!" Nelly Guest lamented: "my pet enemies are going to have a real treat at the pageant unless I can find some way to reduce, inside a fortnight."

"There was a man in London had a marvelous system," Fanny volunteered. "Everybody was going to him last Season. There ought to be somebody like him over here."

Duly encouraged, she launched into a startlingly detailed account of London's latest fad in "treatment"; and Lucinda's thoughts turned back to her other self, insensibly her identity receded into and merged with its identity again and became lost in its preoccupations.

How to go on, how to play out this farce of a life with Bel when faith in him was dead?

Strange that faith should have been shattered finally by such a minor accident as her overhearing that morning's treachery. As if it had been the first time she had known Bel to be guilty of disloyalty to her! But today she could not forget that neither love nor any kindly feeling for his wife, nor even scruples of self-respect, but only dread of a contretemps had decided Bel against lunching Amelie in that very room, making open show o£ his infatuation before all those people who knew them both and who, being human, must have gloated, nudged, and tittered; who, for all Lucinda knew to the contrary, were even now jeering behind their hands, because they knew things about Bel and his gallivantings which all the world knew but his wife. Even the servants – !

Her cheeks kindled with indignation – and blazed still more ardently when she discovered that she had, in her abstraction, been staring squarely at Richard Daubeney, who was lunching with friends at a nearby table.

But Dobbin bowed and smiled in such a way that Lucinda's confusion and her sense of grievance were drowned under by a wave of gratitude. She nodded brightly and gave him a half-laughing glance.

Good old Dobbin! She had never appreciated how much she was missing him till he had turned up again last night and offered to take his old place in her life, on the old terms as nearly as might be, the old terms as necessarily modified by her own change of status.

What a pity!

Those three words were so clearly sighed in her mental hearing that Lucinda, fearing lest she had uttered them aloud, hastily consulted the faces of her companions. But they had exhausted the subject of reducing régimes and passed on naturally – seeing that Nelly and Jean were approaching that stage when such matters become momentous – to that of "facials."

"… Parr's fuller's earth and witch hazel. Make a thick paste of it and add a few drops of tincture of benzoin, then simply plaster it all over your face, but be careful not to get it near your eyes, and let it dry. It only takes a few minutes to harden, and then you crack and peel it off, and it leaves your skin like a baby's."

"Elizabeth Baird charges twenty-five dollars a treatment."

"But my dear, you can see for yourself how stupid it is to pay such prices to a beauty specialist when the materials cost only a few cents at any drug-store, and anybody can apply it, your maid if you don't want to take the trouble yourself…"

What a pity!

But was it? Would she have been happier married to Dobbin? Was it reasonable to assume that Dobbin would not have developed in the forcing atmosphere of matrimony traits quite as difficult as Bel's to deal with? In this wrong-headed world nobody was beyond criticism, and anybody's faults, condonable though they might seem at a distance, could hardly fail of exaggeration into vices through daily observation at close range. Impossible to imagine any two human creatures living together, after the first raptures had begun to wane, without getting on each other's nerves now and then.