Gilbert Palgrave turned back to his dressing table.An hour gave him ample time to get ready.
"Don't let that bath get cold," he said."And look here.You may take those links out.I'll wear the pearls instead."The small, eel-like Japanese murmured sibilantly and disappeared into the bathroom.
This virginal girl, who imagined herself able to play with fire without burning her fingers, was providing him with most welcome amusement.And he needed it.He had been considerably bored of late--always a dangerous mood for him to fall into.He was thirty-one.
For ten years he had paid far more than there had been any necessity to keep constantly amused, constantly interested.Thanks to a shrewd ancestor who had bought large tracts of land in a part of Manhattan which had then been untouched by bricks and mortar, and to others, equally shrewd, who had held on and watched a city spreading up the Island like a mustard plant, he could afford whatever price he was asked to pay.Whole blocks were his where once the sheep had grazed.
Ingenuity to spend his income was required of Palgrave.He possessed that gift to an expert degree.But he was no easy mark, no mere degenerate who hacked off great chunks of a splendid fortune for the sake of violent exercise.He was too indolent for violence, too inherently fastidious for degeneracy.And deep down somewhere in a nature that had had no incentive to develop, there was the fag end of that family shrewdness which had made the early Palgraves envied and maligned.Tall and well built, with a handsome Anglo-Saxon type of face, small, soft, fair mustache, large, rather bovine gray eyes, and a deep cleft in his chin, he gave at first sight an impression of strength--which left him, however, when he spoke to pretty women.
It was not so much the things he said,--light, jesting, personal things,--as the indications they gave of the overweening vanity of the spoiled boy and of a brain which occupied itself merely with the fluff and thistledown of life.He was, and he knew it and made no effort to disguise the fact, a typical specimen of the very small class of indolent bystanders made rich by the energy of other men who are to be found in every country.He was, in fact, the peculiar type of aristocrat only to be found in a democracy--the aristocrat not of blood and breeding or intellect, but of wealth.He was utterly without any ambition to shine either in social life or politics, or to achieve advertisement by the affectation of a half-genuine interest in any cause.On the contrary, he reveled in being idle and indifferent, and unlike the aristocrats of Europe he refused to catch that archaic habit, encouraged at Eton and Oxford, of relating everything in the universe to the standards and prejudices of a single class.
Palgrave was triumphantly one-eyed and selfish; but he waited, with a sort of satirical wistfulness, for the time when some one person should cause him to stand eager and startled in a chaos of individualism and indolence and shake him into a Great Emotion.He had looked for her at all times and places, though without any troublesome optimism or personal energy, and had almost come to believe that she was to him what the end of the rainbow is to the idealist.In marrying Alice he had followed the path of least resistance.She was young, pretty and charming, and had been very much in love with him.Also it pleased his mother, and she had been worth pleasing.He gave his wife all that she could possibly need, except very much of himself.She was a perfectly dear little soul.
Joan only kept him waiting about fifteen minutes.With perfect patience he stood in front of an Italian mirror in the drawing-room, smoking a cigarette through a long tortoise-shell holder.He regarded himself with keen and friendly interest, not in the least surprised that his wife's little friend from the country so evidently liked him.He found that he looked up to his best form, murmured a word of praise for the manner in which his evening coat was cut and smiled once or twice in order to have the satisfaction of getting a glimpse of his peculiarly good teeth.Then he laughed, called himself a conceited ass and went over to examine a rather virile sketch of a muscular, deep-chested young man in rowing costume which occupied an inconspicuous place among many well-chosen pictures.He recognized Martin, whom he had seen several times following the hounds, and tried to remember if Alice had told him whether Joan had run away with this strenuous young fellow or been run away with by him.There was much difference between the two methods.
He heard nothing, but caught the scent of Peau d'Espagne.It carried his mind back to a charming little suite in the Hotel de Crillon in Paris.He turned and found Joan standing in the doorway, watching him.
"Did you ever row?" she asked.
"No," he said, "never.Too much fag.I played squash and roulette.
You look like a newly risen moon in her first quarter.Where would you like to go?""I don't know," said Joan."Let's break away from the conventional places.I rather want to see queer people and taste different food.
But don't let's discuss it.I leave it to you." She went downstairs.
She might have been living in that house for years.
He followed, admiring the way her small, patrician head was set on her shoulders, and the rich brown note of her hair.Extraordinary little person, this! He told his chauffeur to drive to the Brevoort, and got into the car.It was possible at that hour to deal with the Avenue as a street and not as a rest-cure interrupted by short spurts.
"Would you rather the windows were up, Gehane?" he asked, looking at her through his long lashes.