Page:Weird Tales v41n04 (1949-05).djvu/57

Rh mouth with long, tapering fingertips. "It's only for a few days!"

On the way up to the Lodge in the mountains Phoebe Andrews did some thinking, as much thinking as was compatible with one of her type. Motoring helped her think—she did the driving because her father's eyesight wasn't so good, while he'd sit in the back and occasionally tell anecdotes she'd heard before or reminisce about his wife, her mother, who'd been dead for more years than you can remember somebody well through.

In the vernacular, and by the standards that are standard, her father was a good father. He had been more than moderately successful in his business, had sent his daughter to the best schools and given her the best opportunities.

Phoebe was an "only"; she sensed casually and with no interest that there was some mystery surrounding those early, dim days where, as a child develops out of the vacuum of consciousless infancy, it first begins to be aware. But this mystery was something that never piqued her curiosity much. If her mother had lived, she might have asked. Somewhere tucked away back of her twenty-one years was the impression of another one. Perhaps another birth, another child. It had died, or something too grim like that! Phoebe never knew, never cared particularly, aand certainly her father never said anything.

ER thoughts were mainly on Leland. He was currently at the top of her sweepstakes. He had several outstanding plus signs after his name. There were a good many young men with money after Phoebe. There were a great many with good looks after her and a sizable number whose company she enjoyed. To tolerate a man, to enjoy him would be the limit of Phoebe's love for anyone outside of herself. It was for her to choose, on the other hand, who she would allow to worship her, and that permission should, of itself, more than repay any amount of abject male devotion. She had basked in this kind of attention ever since, as a fourteen-year-old just divorced from her pigtails, she went to her first dance.

"Do you like him, Dad?" she broke into a long silence as the car's tires swished on the hot tar road that wound into the mountains.

"Who?" Her father, semi-drowsing in the back seat, came awake with the discipline of one who, even though its parent, was considerably in awe of this beautiful girl-child.

"Leland, of course! Silly! You were sleeping!"

"He seems all right," her father admitted grudgingly. What he thought, he knew, would mean little. Phoebe would do what she wanted and marry whoever she wanted, and, after all, his only concern was that she be happy.

The Lodge was as usual, even to Judge Scanlon and Colonel Rossiter, those perennial guests who greeted her father with enthusiasm on the portico to renew some multi-versioned account of a fishing or hunting trip taken long ago.

Phoebe drifted off into the younger strata with a smile that was as cool and condescending as her white crepe dress. There were a few of the old familiar faces, and the men belonging to them came to her quickly, almost fervently. Phoebe bestowed each with a special smile.

For the girls she had a certain set-apart sympathy which, in no way, interfered with her own techniques but which occasionally caused her to view them with some compassion through the green, obliqueness of what Leland (cute boy!) had once called her "soulless" eyes.

All her life Phoebe had noticed the other girls, watched them and felt superior to them with a secret inner smile. And she was superior. The turbulence that she had caused at the resort right now was another proof of something that needed no proving.

Yes, the Lodge was the same as usual. But there was, Phoebe came to notice, one difference. The difference was Phyllis Kent. Phoebe got the name from one of the resort desk clerks, and the fact that she did was a mute testimony to the other girl.

SeSo [sic] she knew her name even before formal introductions one day on the tennis court. Phyllis was like those others in many ways. She had arrived alone. Nobody seemed