Page:Conflict (1927).pdf/54

 She was very beautiful! Of course. With those eyes. They were as big as pools. Sheilah hardly dared to look at them for fear Cicely would catch her staring as if they were a birth-mark. They were brown, like the dark rich brown of after-dinner coffee, and liquid like coffee, and full of the same mahogany lights, when the sun shone on them. They were fringed with long lashes that had that queer sooty look as if there was black pollen on them. You wondered why the pollen didn't shake off on the rose-colored petal of Cicely's smooth cheek. Her hair was reddish black like her eyes, and always lay in lovely nestling curves and waves around her neck and forehead. Cicely had grown up with beauty, and with the homage that goes with it. She had the smooth, take-it-for-granted manner of a queen.

She had been 'out' several years now. The fame of the success of that first winter of hers in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Washington (she had friends everywhere) had been repeated over and over again to Sheilah. Most frequently by Sheilah's mother. So frequently, in fact, and so explicitly, that Sheilah had become aware that her mother desired some such success for her! And actually believed it possible. Ridiculous! Why, she was no more like Cicely than a daisy is like a rose, or a sparrow like a tanager.