The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
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her; but she would have suffered no less if almost any other had been the discoverer. In this gentleman, after hearing that he was Mildred's Mr. Arthur Russell, Alice felt not the slightest "personal interest"; and there was yet to develop in her life such a thing as an interest not personal. At twenty-two this state of affairs is not unique.
So far as Alice was concerned Russell might have worn a placard, "Engaged." She looked upon him as diners entering a restaurant look upon tables marked "Reserved": the glance, slightly discontented, passes on at once. Or so the eye of a prospector wanders querulously over staked and established claims on the mountainside, and seeks the virgin land beyond; unless, indeed, the prospector be dishonest. But Alice was no claim-jumper--so long as the notice of ownership was plainly posted.
Though she was indifferent now, habit ruled her: and, at the very time she wondered why she created fictitious cigars for her father, she was also regretting that she had not boldly carried her Malacca stick down-town with her. Her vivacity increased automatically.
"Perhaps the clerk thought you wanted the cigars for yourself," Russell suggested. "He may have taken you for a Spanish countess."
"I'm sure he did!" Alice agreed, gaily; and she hummed a bar or two of "LaPaloma," snapping her fingers as castanets, and swaying her body a little, to suggest the accepted stencil of a "Spanish Dancer." "Would you have taken me for one, Mr. Russell?" she asked, as she concluded the impersonation.
"I? Why, yes," he said. "I'D take you for anything you wanted me to."
"Why, what a speech!" she cried, and, laughing, gave him a quick glance in which there glimmered some real surprise. He was looking at her quizzically, but with the liveliest appreciation. Her surprise increased; and she was glad that he had joined her.
To be seen walking with such a companion added to her pleasure. She would have described him as "altogether quite stunning-looking"; and she liked his tall, dark thinness, his gray clothes, his soft hat, and his clean brown shoes; she liked his easy swing of the stick he carried.
"Shouldn't I have said it?" he asked. "Would you rather not be taken for a Spanish countess?"
"That isn't it," she explained. "You said----"
"I said I'd take you for whatever you wanted me to. Isn't that all right?"
"It would all depend, wouldn't it?"
"Of course it would depend on what you wanted."
"Oh, no!" she laughed. "It might depend on a lot of things."
"Such as?"
"Well----" She hesitated, having the mischievous impulse to say, "Such as Mildred!" But she decided to omit this reference, and became serious, remembering Russell's service to her at Mildred's house. "Speaking of what I want to be taken for," she said;--"I've been wondering ever since the other night what you did take me for! You must have taken me for the sister of a professional gambler, I'm afraid!"
Russell's look of kindness was the truth about him, she was to discover; and he reassured her now by the promptness of his friendly chuckle. "Then your young brother told you where I found him, did he? I kept my face straight at the time, but I laughed afterward--to myself. It struck me as original, to say the least: his amusing himself with those darkies."
"Walter IS original," Alice said; and, having adopted this new view of her brother's eccentricities, she impulsively went on to make it more plausible. "He's a very odd boy, and I was afraid you'd misunderstand. He tells wonderful 'darky stories,' and he'll do anything to draw coloured people out and make them talk; and that's what he was doing at Mildred's when you found him for me--he says he wins their confidence by playing dice with them. In the family we think he'll probably write about them some day. He's rather literary."
"Are you?" Russell asked, smiling.
"I? Oh----" She paused, lifting both hands in a charming gesture of helplessness. "Oh, I'm just--me!"
His glance followed the lightly waved hands with keen approval, then rose to the lively and colourful face, with its hazel eyes, its small and pretty nose, and the lip-caught smile which seemed the climax of her decorative transition. Never had he seen a creature so plastic or so wistful.
Here was a contrast to his cousin Mildred, who was not wistful, and controlled any impulses toward plasticity, if she had them. "By George!" he said. "But you ARE different!"
With that, there leaped in her such an impulse of roguish gallantry as she could never resist. She turned her head, and, laughing and bright-eyed, looked him full in the face.
"From whom?" she cried.
"From--everybody!" he said. "Are you a mind-reader?"
"Why?"
"How did you know I was thinking you were different from my cousin, Mildred Palmer?"
"What makes you think I DID know it?"
"Nonsense!" he said. "You knew what I was thinking and I knew you knew."
"Yes," she said with cool humour. "How intimate that seems to make us all at once!"
Russell left no doubt that he was delighted with these gaieties of hers. "By George!" he exclaimed again. "I thought you were this sort of girl the first moment I saw you!"
"What sort of girl? Didn't Mildred tell you what sort of girl I am when she asked you to dance with me?"
"She didn't ask me to dance with you--I'd been looking at you. You were talking to some old ladies, and I asked Mildred who you were."
"Oh, so Mildred DIDN'T----" Alice checked herself. "Who did she tell you I was?"
"She just said you were a Miss Adams, so I----"
"'A' Miss Adams?" Alice interrupted.
"Yes. Then I said I'd like to meet you."
"I see. You thought you'd save me from the old ladies."
"No. I thought I'd save myself from some of the girls Mildred was getting me to dance with. There was a Miss Dowling----"
"Poor man!" Alice said, gently, and her impulsive thought was that Mildred had taken few chances, and that as a matter of self-defense her carefulness might have been well founded. This Mr. Arthur Russell was a much more responsive person than one had supposed.
"So, Mr. Russell, you don't know anything about me except what you thought when you first saw me?"
"Yes, I know I was right when I thought it."
"You haven't told me what you thought."
"I thought you were like what you ARE like."
"Not very definite, is it? I'm afraid you shed more light a minute or so ago, when you said how different from Mildred you thought I was. That WAS definite, unfortunately!"
"I didn't say it," Russell explained. "I thought it, and you read my mind. That's the sort of girl I thought you were--one that could read a man's mind. Why do you say 'unfortunately' you're not like Mildred?"
Alice's smooth gesture seemed to sketch Mildred. "Because she's perfect--why, she's PERFECTLY perfect! She never makes a mistake, and everybody looks up to her--oh, yes, we all fairly adore her! She's like some big, noble, cold statue--'way above the rest of us--and she hardly ever does anything mean or treacherous. Of all the girls I know I believe she's played the fewest really petty tricks. She's----"
Russell interrupted; he looked perplexed. "You say she's perfectly perfect, but that she does play SOME----"
Alice laughed, as if at his sweet innocence. "Men are so funny!" she informed him. "Of course girls ALL do mean things sometimes. My own career's just one long brazen