Linda Condon | Page 5

her.
"Indeed," the other cried heatedly, "from me! I think not. Didn't you ask? Answer me that, if you please. I heard you with my own ears say, 'How?' While now, before my face, you try to deny it." It was plain to Linda that Miss Skillern was totally unmoved by the charge. She moved her lorgnette up, gazing stolidly at the musical programme. "From you," she said again, after a little. Mrs. Randall suddenly regained her equilibrium.
"If the ladies of this hotel are afraid to face that creature I--I--am not. I'll tell her in a minute what a respectable person thinks of her goings-on. More than that, I shall complain to Mr. Rennert. 'Mr. Rennert,' I'll say, 'either she leaves or me. Choose as you will. The reputation of your hotel--'" she spluttered and paused.
"Proof," Miss Skillern pronounced judicially; "proof. We know, but that's not proof."
"He has a wife," Mrs. Randall replied in a shrill whisper; "a wife who is an invalid. Mrs. Zoock, she who had St. Vitus' dance and left yesterday, heard it direct. George A. Jasper, woolen mills in Frankford, Pennsylvania. Mr. Rennert would thank me for that information."
They had forgotten Linda. She stood rigid and cold--they were blaming her mother for going out in a rolling chair with Mr. Jasper because he was married. But her mother didn't know that; probably Mr. Jasper had not given it a thought. She was at the point of making this clear, when it seemed to her that it might be better to say that her mother knew everything there was about Mr. Jasper's wife; she could even add that they were all friends.
Linda would have to tell her mother the second she came in, and then, of course, she'd stop going with Mr. Jasper. Men, she thought in the elder's phrase, were too beastly for words.
"After all," Mrs. Randall was addressing her again, "you needn't say anything at all to your mama. It might make her so cross that she'd spank you."
"Mother never spanks me," Linda replied with dignity.
"If you were my little girl," said Miss Skillern, with rolling lips, "I'd put you over my knee with your skirts up and paddle you."
Never, Linda thought, had she heard anything worse; she was profoundly shocked. The vision of Miss Skillern performing such an operation as she had described cut its horror on her mind. There was a sinking at her heart and a misty threat of tears.
To avert this she walked slowly away. It was hardly past nine o'clock; her mother wouldn't be back for a long while, and she was too restless and unhappy to sit quietly above. Instead, she continued down to the floor where there were various games in the corridor leading to the billiard-room. The hall was dull, no one was clicking the balls about the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in a chair across from the cigar-stand.
He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gaze arrested by her irresolute passage. "Hello, Bellina," he said.
She stopped. "Linda," she corrected him, "Linda Condon." Obeying a sudden impulse, she dropped, with a sigh, into a place beside him.
"You're bored," he went on, the magazine put away. "So am I, but my term is short."
She wondered, principally, what he was doing, among so many women, at the Boscombe. He was different from Mr. Jasper, or the other men with fat stomachs, the old men with dragging feet. It embarrassed her to meet his gaze, it was so--so investigating. She guessed he was by the sea because he felt as badly as he looked. He asked surprisingly:
"Why are you here?"
"On the account of my mother," she explained. "But it doesn't matter much where I am. Places are all alike," she continued conversationally. "We're mostly at hotels--Florida in winter and Lake George in summer. This is kind of between."
"Oh!" he said; and she was sure, from that short single exclamation, he understood everything.
"Like all true beauty," he added, "it's plain that you are durable."
"I don't like the seashore," she went on easily; "I'd rather be in a garden with piles of flowers and a big hedge."
"Have you ever lived in a garden-close?"
"No," she admitted; "it's just an idea. I told mother but she laughed at me and said a roof-garden was her choice."
"Some day you'll have the place you describe," he assured her. "It is written all over you. I would like to see you, Bellina, in a space of emerald sod and geraniums." She decided to accept without further protest his name for her. "You are right, too, about the hedge--the highest and thickest in creation. I should recommend a pseudo-classic house, Georgian, rather small, a white fa?ade against the grass. A Jacobean dining-room, dark