“I must confess,” said Anthony gravely,
“that even I’ve heard one thing
about you.”
Alert at once, she sat up straight. Those eyes,
with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft
granite, caught his.
“Tell me. I’ll believe it. I
always believe anything any one tells me about myself—don’t
you?”
“Invariably!” agreed the two men in unison.
“Well, tell me.”
“I’m not sure that I ought to,”
teased Anthony, smiling unwillingly. She was
so obviously interested, in a state of almost laughable
self-absorption.
“He means your nickname,” said her cousin.
“What name?” inquired Anthony, politely
puzzled.
Instantly she was shy—then she laughed,
rolled back against the cushions, and turned her eyes
up as she spoke:
“Coast-to-Coast Gloria.” Her voice
was full of laughter, laughter undefined as the varying
shadows playing between fire and lamp upon her hair.
“O Lord!”
Still Anthony was puzzled.
“What do you mean?”
“Me, I mean. That’s what some
silly boys coined for me.”
“Don’t you see, Anthony,” explained
Dick, “traveller of a nation-wide notoriety
and all that. Isn’t that what you’ve
heard? She’s been called that for years—since
she was seventeen.”
Anthony’s eyes became sad and humorous.
“Who’s this female Methuselah you’ve
brought in here, Caramel?”
She disregarded this, possibly rather resented it,
for she switched back to the main topic.
“What have you heard of me?”
“Something about your physique.”
“Oh,” she said, coolly disappointed, “that
all?”
“Your tan.”
“My tan?” She was puzzled. Her hand
rose to her throat, rested there an instant as though
the fingers were feeling variants of color.
“Do you remember Maury Noble? Man you met
about a month ago. You made a great impression.”
She thought a moment.
“I remember—but he didn’t call
me up.”
“He was afraid to, I don’t doubt.”
It was black dark without now and Anthony wondered
that his apartment had ever seemed gray—so
warm and friendly were the books and pictures on the
walls and the good Bounds offering tea from a respectful
shadow and the three nice people giving out waves
of interest and laughter back and forth across the
happy fire.
On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together
in the grill room at the Plaza. Her fur-trimmed
suit was gray—“because with gray you
have to wear a lot of paint,” she explained—and
a small toque sat rakishly on her head, allowing yellow
ripples of hair to wave out in jaunty glory.
In the higher light it seemed to Anthony that her
personality was infinitely softer—she seemed
so young, scarcely eighteen; her form under the tight
sheath, known then as a hobble-skirt, was amazingly
supple and slender, and her hands, neither “artistic”
nor stubby, were small as a child’s hands should
be.
