Dan looked at her sharply. “Isn’t it all right?” His voice had that dangerous gentleness at which she always winced.
“Is she coming back this summer?” She dropped the sewing.
Dan put aside the cards and came beside her. Under the flare of the reading light her face seemed thinner and more childish. There was a miraculous subtlety of features, a hidden delicate something which he could not analyze; he felt boorish, brutal, as absurd as when he was one of Thurley’s guests at a party and every one really made polite game of him.
He kept looking at Lorraine, wondering why this change had come about; tired purple shadows were under her eyes, the eyes themselves were soft, shining things seeming to look far beyond him.
She raised her hand, crumpling the sheer, white slip on which she was sewing.
“You mean Thurley,” he stammered, “well—I—I don’t know, dear, you see the Fincherie is Miss Clergy’s house and of course ... oh, _’Raine_ ... now, I understand,” his eyes staring at the tiny, gossamer dress!
With an armful of projects under way, Hobart had little time for Thurley during the winter. He met her with a sort of “You’ve got beyond me but I don’t think I’ll bother to chase after” attitude, praising her when she did well or keeping his silence when she did some showy, foolish thing, food for press agents. He was noncommittal as to Dan Birge’s visits—as Miss Clergy had been, since the latter looked upon them as a particularly choice part of her revenge, for here was a man debarred from marrying the woman he loved, yet following her hopelessly whenever she permitted, Pied Piper fashion.
When Lissa had hinted of unsavory things to him, Hobart dismissed the matter with a careless speech and a shrug of the shoulders. This he had learned to do long ago, whenever Lissa came prattling of some imaginary scandal which pleased her tarnished mind. There had been the time she tried to convince Hobart that Collin really did not paint his own pictures, but hypnotized Polly into doing it and thus kept her starving in a garret, hopelessly in love with Collin and Collin playing a modern Svengali. Lissa had endeavored for many days to make Ernestine believe that Caleb was the storm center of a liaison with a Broadway actress, thus ferreting out Ernestine’s state of mind concerning Caleb and promptly running to Caleb to tell him, ever so confidentially, that Ernestine was in danger of drinking herself to death, poor woman,—too bad she loved that wretched gypsy violinist who had played with her in concert work—could nothing be done about it? The world had soon learned not to value Lissa’s information, paying no heed to her hints of Sam Sparling’s dreadful actions or that Bliss Hobart did not go to his hermitage in the Maine woods—why, there was the silliest little movie actress at San Diego—living in a perfect castle, too—