Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/36

 She met him at the door, wearing a gown of demure color—gray—but of lines very far from demure. Her shoes and stockings matched the gown, and the string of beads tight about her throat were the shade of her hair. Study in gray and red. Even her eyes, which he had observed before only as wise and slanting, were gray, the daylight showed him—an odd blue-gray, like fog on an ocean harbor.

"You're not late," she said in response to his hurried apology. "That is, no later than most college men. Come in, Jock Hamill."

The room into which she conducted him was large, but it seemed small because it was so very full of things. A grand piano, two cushion-littered divans, many deep chairs, smoking stands, tables of all shapes and sizes heaped high with magazines, a spinet desk that oozed letters—all combined to give an effect of cheerful and luxurious confusion. While Yvonne went to don a hat, Jock had opportunity to examine it more in detail. He noted evidences of a bizarre, erotic taste in reading-matter, and the walls reminded him of a theater lobby, so decked were they with photographs of stage and screen celebrities. These were framed, and variously autographed. Yvonne, with love from So-and-So; Yvonne, with every good wish from So-and-So else. "Wonder if she's an actress herself?" Jock speculated, and became suddenly aware that he knew nothing whatever of this girl save her name and her visible loveliness.

Later, when they were seated face to face across a square of damask in a famous restaurant, he put something of this into words. "You haven't told me anything about you."

"Why should I?"

"Well, we're going to be friends, aren't we?"