Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/128

 'Lanice...you shall not...be so cruel to yourself and to me.'

He took her in his arms with a hardihood that precluded struggle. If he had made the little furtive advances of Augustus, she would have known how to retire modestly, but her flimsy code went down before the novelty of this situation and the onslaught of this grasping animal that a few minutes before had been what she would have described as 'one of our authors.'

The sun, intensified by the snow outside, splashed down over the chaise-longue and gleamed on the brassy yellow of Mr. Jones's tumbled hair and the sleek black of the girl's head.

'Captain Jones, don't, don't, don't!...Oh, let me go! Dear God, help me!'

'No, no,' he protested; then after a long, pregnant pause, 'never.'

That night she dreamed that the bronze boxer Mamma had sent her got out of the stereoscope and, still maintaining his exquisite and almost painful perspective, chased her over great desert spaces. She woke at dawn, feverish and aching; lay awake, cried a little, thought what clothes she would take with her to Arabia, and wondered if Captain Jones really could prefer her own sleek charm to the sweet-pea prettiness of the Scollay girls.

For two weeks she went daily to the small red house that stood on the lower side of West Cedar