Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/225

Rh six weeks of Dr. Booth's flattering and irresistible attentions. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before. Homage, in the dazzling form that Dr. Booth offered it, had never been paid to Reba in her life. To find herself seated in a restaurant at a little electric-candle-lighted table, her hands folded upon a snowy cloth, awaiting the arrival of little-neck clams embedded on cracked ice, or huge salmon-colored cantaloupe, or chilled heart-of-watermelon, with such dishes as broiled-live-lobster, or mushrooms under glass to follow, was so new to Reba that even without the lean hands folded two inches away from hers upon the cloth, and the gaze of the blue, brown-flecked eyes so disconcertingly near—even without these, it would have been difficult for her to resist the lure of the elegance of the entertainment offered her.

Chadwick Booth's personality itself was, of course, attractive to Reba, but it was not only the charm he possessed for women generally that held her. There was charm to her in the things he wore. His linen for instance, glimpses of striped lavenders, and cool greens, gave pleasure to Reba. There was something about his very shoes, too, a smartness, trigness, that was indicative to her of the fastidious world he had stepped out of—down out of—to spend some of his precious hours of recreation with her. She was continually stealing joy, too, from such physical details as high cheek-bones; smoothly shaven jaws; white shining teeth, beneath the small, black bristling mustache; clean high expanse of forehead. To Reba, Chadwick Booth's inclination to baldness betokened a subtle refinement that had been quite absent in her shock-headed Italian, and the sailor.