The Coast of Chance | Page 7

Clara. Yet of them all Clara was the only one she had failed to capture.
Clara was always there in the middle of her affairs, but surveying them
from a distance, and Flora's struggle with her had resolved itself into
the attempt to keep her from seeing too much, from seeing more than
she herself saw. Clara's seeing, thus far, had always been to help, but
Flora sometimes wondered whether in an emergency this help could be
depended on--whether Clara could give anything without exacting a

price.
Their dubious intimacy had created for Flora a special sort of
loneliness--a loneliness which lacked the security of solitude; and it
was partly as an escape from this that she had accepted Harry Cressy.
By herself she could never have escaped. The initiative was not hers.
But he had presented himself, he had insisted, had overruled her
objections, had captured her before she knew whether she wanted it or
not--and held her now, fascinated by his very success in capturing her,
and by his beautiful ruddy masculinity. She did not ask herself whether
women ever married for greater reasons than these. She only wondered
sometimes if he did not stand out more brilliantly against Clara and the
others than he intrinsically was. But these moments when she was
obliged to defend him to herself were always when he was not with her.
Even in the dusky carriage she had been as aware of the splendor of his
attraction as now when they had stopped between the high lamps of the
club entrance, and she saw clearly the broad lines of his shoulders and
the stoop of his square-set head as he stepped swingingly to the
pavement. After all, she ought to be glad to think that he was going to
stand up as tall and protectingly between her and the world, as now he
did between her and the press of people which, like a tide of water,
swept them forward down the hall, sucked them back in its eddy, and
finally cast them, ruffled like birds that have ridden a storm, on the
more generous space of the wide, upward stair.
From here, looking down on the current sweeping past them, the little
islands of black coats seemed fairly drowned in the feminine sea
around them--the flow of white, of pale blue and rose, and the high
chatter, like a cage of birds, that for the evening held possession.
"Ladies' Night!" Harry Cressy mopped his flushed face. "It's awful!"
Flora laughed in the effervescence of her spirits. She wanted to know,
teasingly, as they mounted, if this were why he had brought two more
to add to the lot. He only looked at her, with his short note of laughter
that made her keenly conscious of his right to be proud of her. She was
proud of herself, inasmuch as herself was shown in the long trail of
daring blue her gown made up the stair, and the powdery blue of the

aigrette that shivered in her bright, soft puffs and curls--proud that her
daring, as it appeared in these things, was still discriminating enough to
make her right.
She could recall a time when she had not even been quite sure of her
clothes. Not Clara's subdued rustle at her side could make her doubt
them now; but her security was still recent enough to be sometimes
conscious of itself. It was so short a time since all these talking groups,
that made a personage of her, had had the power to put her quite out of
countenance. The women who craned over their shoulders to speak to
her--how hard she had had to work to make them see her at all! And
now she did not know which she felt more like laughing at, herself or
them, for having taken it so seriously. For, when one thought of it,
wasn't it absurd that people out of nowhere should suppose themselves
exclusive? And people out of nowhere they were, herself and all the
rest of them. From causes not far dissimilar they had drifted or
scrambled to where they now stood. It was a question of squatter rights.
The first on the ground were dictators, and how long they could hold
their claim against invaders a dubious cast of fate. For there were for
ever fresh invasions, and departures; swift risings from obscurity,
sudden fallings back into oblivion, brilliant shootings through of
strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were
established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in
the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid,
unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also
this very quality of transformation that most stirred and delighted her.
And