Balloons | Page 7

At any rate, the girl had made a brilliant marriage,
which might or might not mean a broken heart. It was, Lucy thought
tenderly, so characteristic of Tony to have sown such legitimate wild
oats. An engagement contracted and broken off in gusty fits of honour.

"You look very lovely," he smiled at her.
She was shimmering in silvery blue, her eyes like cloudy star sapphires,
her hair like primroses and ashes.
In the motor she leant against him, a discreet gentle pressure. She
always gave you a feeling of delicately intertwined reticencies and
avowals, a faint New England flavouring which she had never lost.
"I do hope they'll like me," she murmured.
Dinner was a great success. Lucy loved her neighbours and her
neighbours loved her, while secretly congratulating themselves on
having always been right about Boston (which they had never visited
and of which they knew nothing).
After dinner a few guests trickled in for the tiny dance that was to
follow. It was all very much as Lucy had imagined it, old ladies
delighted by her youth, old men delighted by her prettiness. Every one
saying that she was very un-American (by which they meant unlike the
Americans they had known).
Then, suddenly, a hushed silence grabbed hold of all the various
conversations. Tony got up. His hostess was saying, "I want to present
Mrs. Everill." Some one in a corner gave a little suppressed laugh,
Lucy looked.
She saw a thin, dark woman with charming irregular features and a
figure which looked as if it had been put into her black velvet dress
with a shoehorn, and she heard her say in a low voice which somehow
seemed to creep inside shut parts of you, "Tony and I are very old
friends." They were coming straight to her and then, next thing she
knew was that voice again, saying, "Mrs. Everill, you must forgive me
if I say that, for the moment, you are to me, just Tony's wife. But, of
course, I know that to be that you must be a great many other things
besides."
Lucy knew that every one was looking at them, not at her, Lucy, the

bride (and she had been so proud and happy--childishly happy--to be a
bride), not at Tony, not even at Lady Dynevor, but at them, at the
situation. It seemed to Lucy so indecent, so vulgar.
"You will love Lucy, Vivian," Tony said quietly, and Lucy looked up at
the charming, gracious apparition so dominant, with her beautifully
friendly manner. Her eyes looked as if she could never find the bottom,
as if tears were just going to well up and drown them.
"Of course I shall," she said, and there was a little edge on her voice, as
if it were going to break. That was the feeling she gave you, Lucy
thought, of being on the brink of something, a tenseness like the
moment when the conductor's baton is raised before you have been
released by the music.
"How ill you look," Tony was saying. Vivian laughed,
"You always said that, do you remember----?"
Conversation was buzzing again. Lucy turned to her neighbour.
Through what he was saying, she could hear Tony--"your white velvet
dress--do you remember...?"
She got up to dance. The room seemed to whirl round her while she
stood quite still.
"Of course, we know all about Boston, Mrs. Everill," her partner was
saying, "it produces beans and Cabots and blue-stockings--and brides,"
he added, smiling.
Tony and Vivian were still sitting on their sofa. As she passed, she
heard Vivian laugh, "Do you remember?"
The evening seemed to Lucy interminable. Tony was very good. He did
his duty very nobly, dancing with every one, even his wife.
At half-past one they went home.
"How charming Lady Dynevor is," Lucy murmured.

"Charming?" Tony looked puzzled. "Vivian?"
It obviously seemed to him an almost grotesquely irrelevant,
inadequate word. And then, feeling that something was expected of him,
"She is a wonderful woman, loyal, faithful, a real friend."
"She is very pretty," Lucy said.
"Pretty, is she? I hadn't noticed it." Again he seemed puzzled, as if it
were really too difficult to connect up these absurd adjectives with
Vivian. Then an idea occurred to him.
"You're not jealous, sweetheart, are you?"
"No," she lied.
"Vivian is--well, Vivian," he explained, making matters worse. And
Lucy knew that if she had said "beautiful, fascinating, majestic," if she
had used all the superlatives in the world, they would have seemed to
him equally irrelevant and inadequate. But Tony was very much in love
with his wife and she knew it and soon, in his tender, whimsical, loving,
teasing way, he had made her perfectly happy again.
She was standing in front of her dressing-table, her cendre
hair--shadows shot with