Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel. Vance Louis Joseph

wants him, please?"

      "Oh, Dobbin! I'm so glad."

      "You, Cinda!" The instantaneous change of tone would have been laughable if it hadn't been worse, the cause of a little flutter of forbidden delight. "Why, bless your soul! I'm glad I came back. They barely caught me at the door."

      "Were you in a hurry to get on somewhere, Dobbin? I mean, am I detaining you?"

      "Not a bit. Foolishly staggering out to try to find some place where the cooking was less perfunctory than here at the club."

      "Sure you've got nothing important on?"

      "If you must know, I was wondering what to do with a lonely evening."

      "Then that makes two of us. Why can't we join forces and be miserable together?"

      "With you? I'll do my best, but I don't promise… What's up?"

      "Oh, everything, more or less. I'm in a villainous temper, Dobbin, and you'll be a dear if you'll come and dine with me – Bel's telephoned he won't be home – talk me into a decent humour and take me to the opera. And then – I don't care what we do!"

      "Well, if you're half as reckless as you try to make out, you certainly need somebody to keep you from kicking over the traces."

      "Then you will come?"

      "Stop pretending to be stupid. When?"

      "As soon as you like."

      Later, seated at her dressing-table, adding those deft touches whose secret one woman in ten thousand knows, touches which lift an evening toilette out of the ruck of commonplace prettiness and render it wholly sorcerous, Lucinda caught in her mirror an odd look of dubious speculation on the face of the maid who waited by her shoulder.

      Half an hour earlier such a look would have irritated, now its impertinence had no more effect than to make Lucinda smile illegibly at her image in the glass. What did it matter what questions might be taking form in that shallow mind? If Bel could afford to ignore the gossip of servants, that had its source in knowledge of his escapades no doubt infinitely more detailed and precise than she might ever hope or fear to gain – why, so could Bel's wife afford to go her own way and let this scandal-mongering world go hang.

      Whether or not she could afford it, she meant henceforward to make her own life – as Bel did, as everybody did – and an end to this drifting with the winds of forlorn and fading hopes. She was too young, too proud, too richly warmed by ardent wine of life, to accept without a murmur affronts and slights such as were now her daily portion, without a struggle reconcile herself to the estate of the outworn wife, tolerated mainly as an ornamental prop to the dignity of the house of Druce.

      Bel should learn…

      Poised lightly before the cheval-glass for the final inspection from head to foot, she perceived that she had never made herself lovelier for Bel; and Dobbin's spontaneous tribute as she entered the drawing-room agreeably confirmed this judgment.

      "Heavens, Cinda! how do you do it?"

      "Like the way I look tonight?"

      "Like! It's unfair, it's premeditated cruelty, monstrous! You ought to be ashamed of yourself to look like that to a man who's having a tough-enough fight with himself as it is."

      "Fraud," Lucinda commented coolly. "You know you fancy yourself no end in the rôle of the luckless lover, you'd be scared silly if I gave you any reason to fear you'd ever have another part to play."

      "Try me and see."

      "No fear. I like you too well as you are. The part fits you to perfection, you do play it beautifully. Please don't ever stop: I love it."

      "Imp! You need a good shaking. Don't you know you're flirting with me?"

      "Do you mind?"

      "Oh, no. Not if it amuses you. Not if you'll play fair."

      "What do you call unfair?"

      "For one thing, the way you've turned yourself out tonight."

      "But only a moment ago you were leading me to believe I'd turned out at least passing fair." Lucinda affected a sigh. "And I was so happy to think I'd found favour!"

      "I presume the intellectual level would be lowered if I were to say with What's-his-name, 'If she be not fair to me, what care I how fair she be'?"

      But Lucinda, in a pensive turn, shook her head and, eyeing him gravely, murmured: "I wonder…"

      "What do you wonder, Cinda?"

      "What you told me last night… Was it true?"

      "That I had never stopped being in love with you? God help me! that was true enough, too true."

      "Then I wonder if it's fair to you, and to me, the way we're going. I mean…" She faltered, with a sign of petulance. "Be patient with me, Dobbin. It isn't easy to figure some things out, you know. I mean, if you are in love with me – "

      "Forget the 'if'."

      "And Bel is not… Oh, no, he isn't! He's in love with the figure he cuts as my lord and master and the dashing beau of every other pretty woman – not with me. Well! since you are and he isn't, and I'm discontented, and so fond of you, Dobbin: is it fair to either of us – because I'm bound to think of you, you know, and can't very well think of you dispassionately…" She concluded with a little shrug and a deprecating smile. "I don't know, Dobbin, I really don't know!"

      "It isn't fair," he said – "of course – unless – "

      She nodded seriously: "That's just it."

      "I can only say, Cinda, whatever you do or say or think is right. It's all for you to decide."

      "And I'm afraid I can't – not yet, at least. And when I do, I ought to warn you, the chances are I shan't decide the way you want me to."

      "I know. But don't worry about me. I can take punishment, I've proved that, I think. So do what seems best to you. I'll faithfully follow your lead. I only want to play the game."

      "And I… But we both want to be sure it's worth the scandal, don't we, Dobbin?"

      "You joke about what's life and death to me!"

      "I did it on purpose, old dear." Lucinda tapped his arm intimately with her fan. "Yes, I did. I don't want you to think, afterwards – if it turns out so you'd be tempted to think it – that I didn't, as you say, play fair. So it's only fair to let you find out as soon as possible that I'm an incurably frivolous person, Dobbin, vain, trifling, flippant, and – I'm afraid – a flirt."

      "Not you!"

      "Truly. Haven't I been letting you believe I made myself pretty tonight for your sake? It isn't true, at least not all true. It was for my own sake, really, because we're going to the opera, and everybody I know will see me there, and I want them to know what Bel neglects for his – other women!"

      From the doorway an unctuous voice announced: "Dinner is served, madam."

      XI

      In this newest phase of that day's protean gamut, in this temper of reckless yet cool determination to avenge her pride and coerce life into rendering up all that it had of late withheld, she put every curbing consideration behind, and resolutely set herself for that night at least to live only for the moment and wring from each its ultimate drop of pleasure, to be amused and to be amusing, to make fête and to be fêted.

      Daubeney, wanting whom all her efforts must have been wasted, for whether she love him or not a woman needs a man in love with her at hand to be at her best – Dobbin was fairly dazzled, not so much by charms of person never more witching as by gay spirits the gayer for this sudden indulgence after long inhibition, by delicate audacity, wit swift, mutable and pungent, and passages of sheer bravura in Lucinda's exposition of the arts of coquetry.

      The way she flirted with him was something shameful. For the matter of that, never a masculine moth blundered into the Druce box during the entr'actes but flopped dazedly away, wondering what the deuce was the matter with old Bellamy, had he gone absolutely balmy. But Dobbin in his capacity of cavalier servente suffered more than anybody,