Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/112

 and bleeding strings of red. "Miss Mountford wants you to look these over," she said, laying the package in Jock's lap. "They're new pictures she's just had taken."

A dozen different Yvonnes in a paper package. There was a regal Yvonne. Hair twined like a coronet, chin lifted haughtily, standing against a dark background in a gown all pearls, with one hand at her throat, the other on her hip. There was a rakish, mischievous Yvonne, dimpling back at you over her shoulder. There was a boyish Yvonne in a starched Buster Brown collar tied with a bow. There was a pensive Yvonne whose eyes looked straight into yours and said, "I am thinking of you, Jock Hamill." Clever pictures. Triumph of the photographers' art. A dozen moods imprisoned in sepia.

Jock chose the two that especially appealed to him and set them on the mantelpiece, and, standing off with folded arms, surveyed them. And unexpectedly, tears itched at his eyelids and he said, "God." Beauty like that was a physical hurt; it was a shining sword thrust through and through him. "Why?" he thought. "Why should it make me sad?" He knew. Because it was transient. Because some day there would be little wheel-spoke wrinkles beside those eyes, and deep ugly grooves from the nose to the corners of the mouth. Because some day Yvonne would show these pictures to people and hear them say, "My, but you were pretty when you were a girl!" The thought tore him unendurably. There was something heartbreaking in knowing that loveliness like Yvonne's could not always stay the same, and be immortal.

He dismissed this melancholy with an effort. He took one of the photographs and played a little game with it. He held it out as though for an invisible