CHAPTER II

My dear Miss Stokes,

This will be the fourth time I’ve seen the show and the third time I’ve asked you to go to supper. If you tell me you can’t again, I’ll think you don’t want to—and quit. No, on the whole, I won’t quit. I’ve never done that in my life. I’ll just hang round and bother you till you come, so better come to-night. I’ll be waiting for you.

Sincerely, William Dixon.

Naomi lifted the head-dress of paradise that swayed round her face and handed it absently to the dresser, still concentrating on the note which had been delivered at the theater by special messenger.

“Sincerely, William Dixon.” Numberless notes she had received during her show girl career, but never one signed just like that. “Sincerely.” Probably it was a card index of the man.

She laid it down speculatively, the look of Eve through her lashes. Three nights she had put him off. Yes, the apple might safely be held a bit closer to-night—but not too close.

He was waiting just within the stage door, his face eager with anticipation, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. As she came up the stairs that led from the chorus dressing-rooms under the stage, he stepped forward and both hands came out of the pockets.

She clasped the right one, smiling up at him, and his frank eyes shone. He piloted her to a car at the curb. As the door slammed with the sudden intimacy of shutting out the rest of the world, he leaned forward, the glow of his eyes reflected in his voice.

“Gee, this is great! I was afraid you’d turn me down again.” He did not wait for an answer but crowded into the next few moments all the hours of thought which her refusal of his invitations had lengthened into days. “You must have thought me an awful rube, staring at you the way I did. I’ve been afraid it made you sore at me. Did it?”

“No woman thinks a man’s a rube for staring at her.”

“I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t take my eyes off you.”

In the shadows of the car she smiled softly.

“Funny, how I walked into that place, cussing the smoke and noise and then saw you. Lord, suppose I hadn’t gone!”

She smiled again.

He went on.

“You’ve seen me every night in the first row at the theater, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I’ve seen you.”

“And I think it’s a punk show,” his teeth flashed in a quick grin. “So now you know why I came.”

She looked at him from under weighty lids. As if he had to tell her!

“One lone show girl can’t be worth a speculator’s ticket four times,” she prompted.

“She’s worth lots more than that. Thank you for coming to-night.”

His voice turned serious. He tucked the robe into her corner of the seat for no other reason than the magnet of bending over her, of breathing the faint fragrance that wafted from her like an aura. It was the ghost of grease-paint and flowers, of powder and perfume—that strange, exotic pot-pourri of the theater that clings to its women like essence of old Egypt.

She gazed down at the bent head, at the hands that brushed hers with a boyish lingering as they drew the robe closer. How young he seemed! She felt for the moment much as a man of the world feels when within the scope of his worldliness there appears a radiant young girl. There was the same thrill of interest, the same desire to be the one privileged to open up avenues of possibilities. A man on Broadway who had something to learn! It was like finding a canary in a cage of monkeys!

The strange exuberance was with her as they made their way among crowded tables to the one he had reserved. Amber satin clung to her supple body and long jet earrings almost touched her shoulders. She was conscious that in the attention she drew, she was giving him the sense of pride every man feels when the clatter of forks stops momentarily in tribute to the woman with him. But more than that, she had a sudden personal satisfaction in his pride and a curve softer than any her lips had known for years lifted their corners.

His tanned skin and eyes that glowed seemed lifted straight to the sun rising above the mountains. She took a deep breath, as if from him she could get the stimulus of all outdoors. He looked at the slope of her white shoulders, at the droop of her shadowed eyes, as if in her were epitomized the lure of the city.

She leaned across the table just as he did. Their hands almost met. Naomi had long, languid fingers that invited the touch.

“You’re so—different,” he began. “So awfully different. I guess that’s no news to you, though.”

“So are you—different.”

“Me?”

“Yes—from any man I’ve ever known. You’re like fresh air. The others are—stuffy—like a room that’s been shut tight.”

He gave an embarrassed, pleased laugh.

“Tell me about yourself,” she suggested, lifting the lever best calculated to open up the dam of formality where the male of the species is concerned.

“Oh, nothing much to tell about me.”

And he proceeded to tell it while they went through two courses. She got a vivid picture of Bill Dixon, a colt straining always against harness of any kind; a lad loathing routine to such an extent that he had quit college rather than submit to it; a young man, impulsive as the wind, more tied to the picturesqueness of ranch life than to the business of it; an only son worshipped by the man who had paved the way, who was both father and mother to him.

He bent nearer to the white hands. “Now tell me about you.”

“That would take too long. And if you find out all there is to know to-night, you won’t want to see me again.”

“Won’t I, though! Besides—I could never find out all there is to know about you.”

They danced. He was not a good dancer but as his arm went round her and his dark head bent to her glinting one, she felt herself completely encompassed. His bigness, his nearness, gave her a swift sense of helplessness that frankly frightened her. The reins of the future must be held in her cool hands, not in his.

“I’m going to guess your age,” she announced when they were once more at opposite sides of the table, “if you’ll promise not to guess mine.”

“I don’t give a darn how old you are.”

“Oh, I’m not as old as all that. But you—you’re twenty-five.”

“Next month. Bet, at that, I’m older than you.”

“You are,” she lied, without a quiver.

“But you’re the sort of woman who’ll always be young—even when you’re wrinkled and gray. It’s your coloring,” he went on, promptly contradicting himself. “That wonderful white skin—I’ve never seen skin so white—and the sheen of your hair and those eyes that make a fellow sort of—sort of want to jump in.”

The eyes smiled at him with infinite promise.

“I think we’re going to like each other,” she said.

“I know one of us does already,” he grinned.

“You’re a dear,” she vouchsafed.

They saw each other every day after that. He managed to bring it about, either for luncheon or early dinner or after the theater. At least he thought he was the one who brought it about. And as Naomi opened his impetuous notes, or the boxes that held great clusters of flowers ordered with awkward disregard of everything but quantity, the Eve-smile lifted the corners of her mouth and her eyes looked a trifle less tired.

Occasionally they drove out to the country for the day. But the countryside near New York rather amused him.

“It all seems sort of puny,” he would say as she sat with face carefully veiled from a too-revealing sun. “I’m used to snow peaks that touch the sky and trees so high that when you’re on the mountain trails above them, you look down and can’t see where they begin.” He turned from the inadequate hills to the more absorbing scenery of a woman’s face misted by a fluttering veil. “No, sir! When I come east, I don’t want this. I want New York—the excitement, the thrill of it. I want—you.”

It was said softly. His voice held the word like a caress and, looking up, she read in his eyes what she had read in many men’s—except that added to it was the new element of awe.

That new element became infinitely dear to her. She let him keep it. Except when their hands brushed accidentally—or so it seemed to him—they did not touch save for the clasp that helped her into a cab or expressed “good-night.” The warmth of his arms closed round her only in the dance. She met the light of his eyes with her own only across restaurant tables. No debutante could have held herself more aloof—perhaps not quite so much so. But Naomi did not play the ingénue. It was her world knowledge—world old—that fascinated him, that made her—as he had said—different.

She amused him with cryptic remarks about the men and women who came and went, with stories of familiar characters on Broadway, with a touch of cynicism, a touch of pessimism, that lack of faith in human nature which comes with disillusionment in self. But this, young Bill Dixon did not know nor count. He merely tossed up his shaggy head with the deep, long laugh that makes the whole body tingle and begged for more.

She managed to fill his days with joy of her when she was with him, with longing for her when she cleverly denied him her companionship. She was the hundred women to one man which her training had taught her to be, knowing that to him she would thus become the one women. She caught hold of his imagination and twisted and played with it as a cat with a ball of twine, tossing it this way and that but always with paw poised to pounce.

And simultaneously there flared into her own soul an eagerness of which Naomi Stokes had long since counted herself incapable. It was as if that brown-eyed, ardent gaze held her with the same absorbing quality of his arms when they danced. She began to look for it—jealously as if it might escape her.

Meanwhile in a hotel room that was just four walls, another pair of gray eyes, not veiled, not mysterious, watched for him more and more anxiously, saw him less and less frequently. The girl from the West whose first visit to New York was to have opened up a fairyland of adventure for her and the boy she loved—the visit they had planned together—found its streets empty caverns at the foot of towering cliffs, saw in hotels and theaters and restaurants to which McConnell and his wife took her night after night in the hope of diverting her, only the possibility, eager yet dreaded, of singling from the crowd the faces of Bill Dixon and the woman who had taken him from her.

She tried to hide her misery from the anxious eyes of her chaperones. But because she was young—a thousand years younger than Naomi—she could not hide it from the one she loved. And her quivering chin, her reproachful reminders of engagements he had overlooked, sent his mind and feet hurrying back to the woman whose red lips and drooping lids thrilled him like the dizzying lights of Broadway, like a draught of wine he had never before tasted.

“Why does a girl think, because you’ve been together all your lives,” he blurted out one night as he and Naomi drove through the jerk and jam of traffic hold-up, “that she has a right to know your comings and goings as if you belonged to her? Good heavens, a fellow can change his mind, can’t he?”

Naomi turned and smiled out of the window at the laughing sparkle of lights. The look, part sphinx, touched her mouth. In the dark he did not see its tinge of satire.

He maintained for a second the silence that is usually accompanied by a bitten cigar or cigarette half-smoked, the silence of irritation. Then he swung about impatiently.

“You’re not like that, Naomi! You’d never ask silly questions.”

She leaned over, touched the hand that clenched and unclenched against his knee.

“Don’t be angry, Billie-boy,” she whispered. “I like to hear you laugh.”

His other hand closed quickly over the white fingers.

“What is it you’ve done to me? I always thought caring about a woman meant wanting to be with her because she liked the things I do, because we understood each other. That’s the way I felt about—” he broke off. “But you—I want to be with you because you’re so different—because I don’t always understand you. I can’t get enough of it—of looking at you, of listening to you. Naomi, do you care—a little bit?”

She lifted her eyes, lifted her lips, forgetting the game she was playing, forgetting the stakes. Then before he saw the move, she drew back. Not yet! She answered him instead with a shadowy smile and the long silent pressure of the hand held fast between his.