Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/214

 apart from them,—and not above them; not obviously below them, either. They seemed to Marjorie—these girls, living in flats and hotels and rented rooms, in restaurants and cafeterias, many of whom were on their way to work—to strike a sort of balance in their valuations of Marjorie and themselves, conceding to her traits they had not and conscious of their possession of an attribute she wanted.

She could not define it, but it was something freer, certainly, and something which engendered confidence; Marjorie felt she had never been in the atmosphere of such aggressive confidence. It was in her attempt to reassert her own superiority that she thought again, definitely, of Mrs. Russell and reminded herself that it was on a street a little farther along that Mrs. Russell lived. It was not until the instant later that Marjorie aggregated with this the fact that her father also had been involved there.

She turned to Clearedge Street and as she neared Mrs. Russell's number, she felt her feet and her hands become light and unsteady in her excitement; she could not think now what she was doing or recall even the exact details of the procedure she had planned during the night. Though she was on the odd-number side of the street, she crossed over to the opposite walk to look up at the third-floor apartment. A woman, or some one, was behind the curtains, Marjorie was sure, as she abruptly recrossed the street and entered the vestibule where Billy and she had rung and waited so long.

White daylight was now illuminating the cream and pale-green tiling and the glass-paneled inner door with the pale-green curtain at which she had stared under the yellow glow of the electric bulb that night. There