Hudson River Bracketed · Book IV · Chapter 17 (2/2)

“Laura Lou!” he exclaimed as the car swayed out into the street. He could hardly believe that this little face with the pale rosy mouth and the delicately traced eyebrows could be that of the sulky flapper of Paul’s Landing. Yet he remembered that one evening when she came in for supper, late and a little flushed, in a faded yellow muslin the colour of her hair, he had thought her almost pretty. Almost pretty⁠—crude fool that he’d been, craving only such coarse fare as Floss Delaney and ’Smeralda Cran! Time had refined his taste as it had his cousin’s features; and he looked at her with new eyes.⁠ ⁠…

“Vance!” she said, in her shy drawling voice, but without a trace of shyness in her own eyes, which rested on him with a sort of affectionate curiosity.

The eyes too were different; instead of being like blurred gray glasses they were luminous as spring water; and they met his with full awareness of the change. It seemed as if, without self-consciousness or fatuity, she knew herself lovely and was glad, as simply as a flower might be. The sight absorbed Vance’s senses; he hardly heard what she was saying, was conscious only of her nearness, burning and radiant, yet so frail, immaterial almost, that she might vanish at a rash word or motion.

“Why, Vance, isn’t it funny? I didn’t know you were in New York,” she said; and he thought: “I used to think her cheekbones too high; and now the little shadow under them is what makes her look like those marble heads of Greek priestesses with the smile under their lids.⁠ ⁠…” (He had seen photographs of them in some book on ancient art, in the Euphoria college library.)

“It’s three years since I was here; you’re grown-up now, aren’t you?” he said; and she conceded: “Why, I s’pose I am,” with a laugh that made her mouth break open on her teeth like a pink pod on pearly seeds.

“Three years⁠—” he echoed; and suddenly he remembered her bending over him as he lay in the hammock, on his first evening at the Tracy’s, and snatching from his buttonhole the spray of lilac he had found on his pillow that morning. “Why, it was you that put the lilac on my pillow before I was awake!” he exclaimed, the words breaking from him before he knew it. He was looking at her intently and she did not avert her gaze; but a light like a rosy reflection stole from her throat to her temples. “Of course it was,” he triumphed. “Why, you’re like a tropical shell with the sun shining through it,” he cried; and she answered: “Oh, Vance, you always did say such killing things. I’ll die laughing if you don’t quit.⁠ ⁠…” It was only when she drew away her soft bare hand that he realized he had held it clutched ever since he had pushed his way to her.⁠ ⁠…

“This vacant lot on your right,” Bunty Hayes was bellowing as the car rolled up Fifth Avenue, “was formerly the site of Selfridge B. Merry’s five-million-dollar marble mansion, lately sold to the Amalgamated Searchlight Company, who are about to erect on it a twenty-five-million-dollar skyscraper of fifty stories, with roof gymnasium, cabaret terrace, New Thought church and airplane landing.⁠ ⁠… The artistic Gothic church on your left is the Reformed Methodist.⁠ ⁠…”

Vance caught back Laura Lou’s hand and pressed it in both of his. “For God’s sake⁠ ⁠… that’s all a joke about your being engaged to him, isn’t it?”

She cast down her lashes, which were of the same velvet texture as her eyebrows, but a darker brown, the colour of brown pansy petals. Her hand still lay confidingly in Vance’s. “Why, I guess he kinder thinks I am.⁠ ⁠…” she said.

“Oh, let him!” cried Vance derisively. He took a quick glance at the Jewish girl in rimless glasses, saw that she had turned away to pass a box of Fuller’s marshmallows down the line, and flinging his arm about Laura Lou, kissed her fervently.

She paled a little and shrank back, but so submissively, with such an air of leaving herself on his lips even though she withdrew her own, that he thought exultantly: “She knows she belongs to me,” and had there been room in his breast for any feeling but rapture it would have been pity for the tight-faced young man bellowing through his megaphone: “We are now approaching the only remaining private residence on Fifth Avenue, belonging to one of the old original society leaders known throughout the world as the Four Hundred.”