Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/148

136 audible "aside." "You are of course familiar with his Cynthia of Samothrace" The person designated materialized momentarily from the dimness as a tall, slim gray man crowned by a mop of back-thrust hair and wearing eyeglasses with wide black ribbons. He looked as though everybody should know all about him and Cynthia of Samothrace and as Kenneth had never heard of either he felt uncomfortable about it.

In like manner he met Herbert Delmore, also tall and slim, but bald as a boulder, with a white ascetic face and long white hands; and Burton Hallowell who looked like a pink cherub with a vandyke beard.

"I'm so sorry that Gordon cannot be with us to-night," Mrs. Carlson went on smoothly. "He was almost heartbroken. Some tiresome business came up." She conveyed skillfully the impression that normally Carlson would be doing the honours at the head of his board. As a fact the poet was at that moment exactly where he always was when his wife gave one of her "damn intellectual parties,"—in the room back of the Fremont bar trying to make a sceptical Jim Paige believe he held at least four kings.

One other slipped in at the last moment, just as they were about to move into dinner, a girl about Kenneth's age wearing a straight smock with a border of Greek design and squarely bobbed hair. Her skin was very white, her lips very red, her eyes were a turquoise green and held an expression of utter and somewhat disdainful weariness. Kenneth found himself beside her as they moved toward the dining room. She, as well as Mrs. Carlson, proved to possess a deep rich mahogany voice, the only difference being that Mrs. Carlson's was naturally so while Miss Wills had arrived at her depths by careful cultivation.

"You are new here," she stated to Kenneth. "You will love it. In this simple out-of-doors we meet again, after all these centuries, the spirit of shepherd Greece. Do you walk?"

"A little; I ride more."

"But you must walk. It is so much more intimate. To-day I met such a sympathetic tree."

"Huh?" ejaculated Kenneth, startled out of his politeness.

She favoured him with a long, slow stare.