“Say—why, if it ain’t Vance Weston!” he exclaimed.
If anything could have troubled Vance in his present mood, it would have been an encounter with Bunty Hayes. The name had only disastrous associations, and he had always thought the man contemptible. But the tide which was sweeping him forward could not be checked by anything as paltry as Bunty Hayes; and Vance, with no more than a moment’s hesitation, put his hand into the other’s, and made one of his abrupt plunges to the point. “Say—you going for a ride in this car?”
“Going for a ride in her?” Bunty echoed with his easy laugh. “Looks like as if I was. Say, why I’m the barker for her, sonny. Thought I was still up at Paul’s Landing, did you, doing write-ups for that cemetery of a paper? No, sir, that was in the far away and long ago. I been showing New York for nearly two years now. Hop right in—got a capacity load, but I guess the girls’ll make room for you. (I’m taking round Saint Elfrida’s select boarding school, from Peapack—yes, sir; six front rows; bunch of lookers, ain’t they? Primarily an art trip; we take in the Lib’ry, the Metropolitan, the Cathedral and the Palisades.) See here, pile in, Vance; never mind about your grip. ’Gainst the rules, I know; but shove it under the seat while the chauffeur’s looking at her appendix. There—in you go; this row. Say, there’s a girl at the other end that’ll give you a squeeze-in next to her; there, the one with the blue hat.”
The barker caught Vance under the elbow to launch him on his way; and then, as he moved forward, called after him stentorianly: “Say, Vance, I want you to meet my feeancee; yes, that’s her in the blue hat. Laura Lou, meet Mr. Weston. … Gee, Vance, but ain’t you Laura Lou’s cousin? Say, well, if I didn’t clean forget you and me’d got acquainted at the Tracys’. … Laura Lou, here’s your cousin Vance Weston, come all the way from Illinois to see you. Now then, ladies and gentlemen, all aboard, please!”
Vance found himself climbing past a row of exposed pink knees. A flutter of girlish exclamations greeted him, and he slipped into a crack between a stout Jewish-looking young woman in rimless glasses and the girl under the blue hat, whose flexible young body seemed to melt against his own as she made room for him.
“Laura Lou!” he exclaimed as the car swayed out into the street. He could hardly believe that this little face with the pale rosy mouth and the delicately traced eyebrows could be that of the sulky flapper of Paul’s Landing. Yet he remembered that one evening when she came in for supper, late and a little flushed, in a faded yellow muslin the colour of her hair, he had thought her almost pretty. Almost pretty—crude fool that he’d been, craving only such coarse fare as Floss Delaney and ’Smeralda Cran! Time had refined his taste as it had his cousin’s features; and he looked at her with new eyes. …
“Vance!” she said, in her shy drawling voice, but without a trace of shyness in her own eyes, which rested on him with a sort of affectionate curiosity.
The eyes too were different; instead of being like blurred gray glasses they were luminous as spring water; and they met his with full awareness of the change. It seemed as if, without self-consciousness or fatuity, she knew herself lovely and was glad, as simply as a flower might be. The sight absorbed Vance’s senses; he hardly heard what she was saying, was conscious only of her nearness, burning and radiant, yet so frail, immaterial almost, that she might vanish at a rash word or motion.
“Why, Vance, isn’t it funny? I didn’t know you were in New York,” she said; and he thought: “I used to think her cheekbones too high; and now the little shadow under them is what makes her look like those marble heads of Greek priestesses with the smile under their lids. …” (He had seen photographs of them in some book on ancient art, in the Euphoria college library.)
“It’s three years since I was here; you’re grown-up now, aren’t you?” he said; and she conceded: “Why, I s’pose I am,” with a laugh that made her mouth break open on her teeth like a pink pod on pearly seeds.
“Three years—” he echoed; and suddenly he remembered her bending over him as he lay in the hammock, on his first evening at the Tracy’s, and snatching from his buttonhole the spray of lilac he had found on his pillow that morning. “Why, it was you that put the lilac on my pillow before I was awake!” he exclaimed, the words breaking from him before he knew it. He was looking at her intently and she did not avert her gaze; but a light like a rosy reflection stole from her throat to her temples. “Of course it was,” he triumphed. “Why, you’re like a tropical shell with the sun shining through it,” he cried; and she answered: “Oh, Vance, you always did say such killing things. I’ll die laughing if you don’t quit. …” It was only when she drew away her soft bare hand that he realized he had held it clutched ever since he had pushed his way to her. …
“This vacant lot on your right,” Bunty Hayes was bellowing as the car rolled up Fifth Avenue, “was formerly the site of Selfridge B. Merry’s five-million-dollar marble mansion, lately sold to the Amalgamated Searchlight Company, who are about to erect on it a twenty-five-million-dollar skyscraper of fifty stories, with roof gymnasium, cabaret terrace, New Thought church and airplane landing. … The artistic Gothic church on your left is the Reformed Methodist. …”
Vance caught back Laura Lou’s hand and pressed it in both of his. “For God’s sake … that’s all a joke about your being
