One Man in His Time | Page 4

anywhere that Patty Vetch was not exactly a lady. Though he was broad enough in his views to realize that types repeat themselves only in variations, and that girls of to-day are not all that they were in the happy eighties--that one might make up flashily like Geraldine St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain in all essential social values "a lady"--still he was aware that the external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way was not the prescribed way of his world. Small as she was there was too much of her. She contrived always to be where one was looking. She was too loud, too vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was too obviously different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of the ballroom Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same startled and fascinated attention.
As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never imagined that anything so small could be so much alive. The electric light under which she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her childish nose, the gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation. It revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and of common sense, over the slippery ground. The son of a strong-minded though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.
"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining ground. When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small muff of feathers.
"Please hold this pigeon," she said, "I saw it this afternoon, and I came out to look for it. Somebody has broken its wings."
"If you came out to walk on ice," he replied with a smile, "why, in Heaven's name, didn't you wear skates or rubbers?"
She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment. "I don't skate, and I never wear rubbers."
He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval. "Then you mustn't be surprised if you get a sprained ankle."
"I am not surprised," she retorted calmly. "Nothing surprises me. Only my ankle isn't sprained. I am just getting my breath."
She had rested her knee on a bench, and she looked up at him now with bright, enigmatical eyes. "You don't mind waiting a moment, do you?" she asked. To his secret resentment she appeared to be deliberately appraising either his abilities or his attractions--he wasn't sure which engaged her bold and perfectly unembarrassed regard.
"No, I don't mind in the least," he replied, "but I'd like to get you home if you have really hurt yourself. Of course it was your own fault that you fell," he added truthfully but indiscreetly.
For an instant she seemed to be holding her breath, while he stood there in what he felt to be a foolish attitude, with the pigeon (for all symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his breast.
"Oh, I know," she responded presently in a voice which was full of suppressed anger. "Everything is my fault--even the fact that I was born!"
Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against his overcoat. What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack of reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable? His fine young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened