Cytherea | Page 3

school; but Helena, shining in the gold and flush of her radiant inattention, would know nothing. Helena, Lee Randon acknowledged, spelled atrociously. If it weren't for the clubs and his spiked shoes he'd turn and go home directly, himself supervise the children's efforts at education. But Fanny did it much better than he; Helena and Gregory were closer to her; while they volunteered endless personal and trivial admissions to her, he had to ask them, detail by detail, what they were doing.
After he had changed his shoes and secured the latticed steel door of his locker he went up to the main room of the clubhouse, where, on the long divan before the open fire, he found Peyton Morris lounging with Anette Sherwin by a low tea table. The hot water, they informed Lee comfortably, was cold, inviting him by implication to ring for more; and then they returned to the conversation he had interrupted. Anette said:
"I asked her from Friday till Monday, over the dance, you see; but she wired she couldn't be sure. They are going to begin rehearsing at any minute, and then shoot--it is shoot, isn't it?--the picture. What did she tell you at the Plaza?"
"The same thing," Peyton replied moodily. "I only saw her for a scrappy dinner; she couldn't even wait for coffee, but rushed up to a conference with her director."
They were, Lee knew, talking about Mina Raff, a friend of Anette's earlier summers by the sea who was beginning to be highly successful in the more serious moving pictures. He had met her a number of years ago, in Eastlake, but he retained no clear impression of her; and, admitting that he hadn't gone to see her in a picture, wondered aloud at her sudden fame. Peyton Morris glanced at him, frowning; he seemed at the point of vigorous speech, then said nothing.
"Mina is lovely now, Lee," Anette spoke in his place; "you will realize that at once. She's like a--a wistful April moon, or corn silk."
"I like black hair," Randon asserted.
"That's amusing, when you think Fanny's is quite brown," Anette replied. "Whom have you been meeting with black hair? There's none I can remember in Eastlake."
"There isn't anybody in particular," Lee reassured her; "it is just an idea of mine." He had a vision of intense black hair swept about an enigmatic still smile, of an old gilt headdress. "Mina Raff must have developed if she gets half the pay advertised."
"She'll get twice that when this contract expires," Peyton put in; "and that will be increased again. No one on the screen can touch her." He made these declarations in a manner both shadowed and aggressive. Lee observed that he held a cigarette in one hand and a match in the other with no effort at conjunction.
"Mina simply tells you everything," Anette continued. "If she comes you must do your best. It's perfectly marvelous, with so much else, that she even considers it. I couldn't budge her when she was practically free."
"How is Claire?" Randon abruptly demanded.
"She's all right," her husband returned; "a little offhand, but no more than usual. I want her to go to the West Indies and take Ira but she won't listen. Why anyone who doesn't have to stay through these rotten winters I can't imagine." A flaming log brought out his handsomely proportioned face, the clear grey eyes, the light carefully brushed hair and stubborn chin. Peyton was a striking if slightly sullen appearing youth--yet he must be on the mark of thirty--and it was undeniable that he was well thought of generally. At his university, Princeton, he had belonged to a most select club; his family, his prospects, even his present--junior partner in a young but successful firm of bond brokers--were beyond reproach. Yet Lee Randon was aware that he had never completely liked Peyton.
His exterior was too hard, too obviously certain, to allow any penetration of the inevitable human and personal irregularities beneath. It might be possible that he was all of a piece of the conventional stereotyped proprieties; but Lee couldn't imagine Claire marrying or holding to a man so empty, or, rather, so dully solid. Claire he admired without reservation--a girl who had become a wife, a mother, with no loss of her vivid character. Her attitude toward Ira, now four years old--wholly different from Fanny's manner with her children--was lightly humorous; publicly she treated her obligations as jokes; but actually, Lee knew, she was indefatigable.
This was a type of high spirits, of highly bred courage, to which he was entirely delivered. Fanny was a perfect mother, a remarkably fine wife, but she bore an evident sense of her responsibilities. She wasn't so good-looking as Claire, who at times was almost beautiful; but Fanny had a very decided kind of attractiveness which