Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/15

 great sleeves of her pelisse and wandered upon the surface of the dark fur. Her eyes moved, glittered and drooped down. Her expression seemed to reflect the ideal of a fashion-plate artist rather than the heart which supposedly beat beneath the tight basque and tighter stays.

No one would have guessed that for two nights and a day she had cried almost without stopping, or that she had had the audacity to run away from home, or the intellectual conceit to believe herself a genius. In Amherst her talents had been recognized. In Boston she would at last receive the proper training and be launched upon a career.

She shut her eyes and savored a sensuous pleasure from the greatness that was to be hers. Yet at her heart she knew that if Augustus had been a different man, she would not now be planning her career but the furnishing of her house, and she was honest enough to realize that one occupation would have been as absorbing as the other. Augustus! what a white rabbit of a man, and so good, so uncarnal, so considerate of her purity. Not many men like that; one should appreciate them. She touched her sleek mouth with a finger tip. 'Dear God,' she returned thanks, 'we thank Thee that he has never kissed me on the mouth, only here,' and she smoothed her cold cheek. Her mind, with its extravagant bursts of day-dreaming, abandoned the career before she had even decided whether her genius lay in art or literature, and spread before her the thought of other men, not Augustuses, not 'young gentlemen from the