At ten o’clock as she stood in her tiny room rather sullenly putting the last touches to her costume, the maid, Héloise, brought her a cable. It was a long message from Ashley wishing her health, happiness and offering to come over at a week’s notice. Somehow the bit of blue paper cheered her, easing her taut nerves. “Of course they’re thinking about me. I’ll hear from Jinny any moment; it’s not her fault that the delivery is late. I wonder what she sent me.”
Returning at three o’clock Christmas morning from the party she put her hand cautiously in the door to switch on the light for fear that a package lay near the threshold, but there was no package there. “Well, even if it were there I couldn’t open it,” she murmured, “for I’m too sleepy.” And indeed she had drugged herself with dancing and gaiety into an overwhelming drowsiness. Barely able to toss aside her pretty dress, she tumbled luxuriously into bed, grateful in the midst of her somnolence for the fatigue which would make her forget. … In what seemed to her less than an hour, she heard a tremendous knocking at the door.
“Entrez,” she called sleepily and relapsed immediately into slumber. The door, as it happened, was unlocked; she had been too fatigued to think of it the night before. Héloise stuck in a tousled head. “My God,” she told the cook afterwards, “such a time as I had to wake her! There she was asleep on both ears and the gentleman downstairs waiting!”
Angela finally opened bewildered eyes. “A gentleman,” reiterated Héloise in her staccato tongue. “He awaits you below. He says he has a present which he must put into your own hands. Will Mademoiselle then descend or shall I tell him to come back?”
“Tell him to come back,” she murmured, then opened her heavy eyes. “Is it really Christmas, Héloise? Where is the gentleman?”
“As though I had him there in my pocket,” said Héloise later in her faithful report to the cook.
But finally the message penetrated. Grasping a robe and slippers, she half leaped, half fell down the little staircase and plunged into the five foot square drawing-room. Anthony sitting on the tremendously disproportionate tan and maroon sofa rose to meet her.
His eyes on her astonished countenance, he began searching about in his pockets, slapping his vest, pulling out keys and handkerchiefs. “There ought to be a tag on me somewhere,” he remarked apologetically, “but anyhow Virginia and Matthew sent me with their love.”
Colophon
Plum Bun
was published in by
Jessie Redmon Fauset.
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Alla Nazimova,
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