Free This Was Tomorrow by Elswyth Thane Page B

don’t you?”
    “Jeff, how do you think I’ll look when I’m Evadne’s age?”
    He contemplated her gravely while the waitress changed the plates.
    “God knows what the styles will be by then,” he said. “But you’ll always have those beautiful greenish eyes, and very few people can match that, and you’ve got small bones, which is another great advantage. You’ll be all right, my girl, just you wait.”
    “Some people do improve a great deal, don’t they, with age?”
    “Yes, take your grandmother, for instance. Virginia is just as fascinating now as she was the first time I ever saw her, when she was a young widow, right after the war. I say young, she must have been well into her thirties then. I’ve never understood, between you and me, why she never got married again. But there’s a legend that our Great-grandmother Tibby was proposed to, and refused him, at the age of sixty, and Virginia’s still got a few years to go on that. And she’ll be fascinating when she’s ninety, if she lives that long, just as Tibby was supposed to be. And then there was—” But before he could embark on the legend of Aunt Sally, who had three husbands, all of them wealthy and all of them dead before she was forty, and who went right on inspiring male devotion when to the family’s certain knowledge she just had to be seventy, Jeff was struck by an idea like a thunderbolt, and he laid down his knife and fork and leaned back, staring across the table at Mab’s intent face. “By gum!” he said inelegantly. “Now I know what it is!”
    “What? What’s the matter, Jeff?”
    “Your eyes,” he said. “That portrait over the mantelpiece at home. You ’ ve got Great-grandmother Tibby’s eyes!”
    “Oh, Jeff! ”
    “Wait till Sylvia comes, she’ll see it too, I know she will! I knew there was something about you, and that’s what it is!”
    “Jeff, shall I see the portrait myself some time? Please?”
    “Yes. That settles it. You’ll see the portrait. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year—but we’ll think of something. We must get you to Williamsburg for sure.”
    “Oh, how wonderful!” she sighed. “I’ve just got a feeling that I’ll go.”
    “Wait till Sylvia comes. She’ll see to it.”
    And after that the matinée was almost an anti-climax.
4
    Johnny Malone, who had been Bracken’s Berlin correspondent in 1914 and was now head of his European Bureau and had married his Cousin Camilla from Richmond, was not amused when they told him of Evadne’s project to change Nazi Germany, and Camilla was frankly horrified. The Cause was not unknown in Berlin, they said, and some Nazis even professed its beliefs, though Johnny doubted if their zeal for restitution and fellowship extended to non-Aryans. The idea itself was worthy enough, he conceded, and certainly the world stood in need of some kind of spiritual rearmament to go with the air-power race which had now begun, but this slightly goofy brand of sweetness and light could only make matters worse, he said, in that it encouraged the fatal German tendency to believe that the English were mad anyway and would never fight another war if they could talk their way through it.
    Johnny and Bracken were discussing half incredulously the Anglo-German Naval Agreement which Ribbentrop had come to London to negotiate with the MacDonald Government. Bracken said England never would ,and Johnny offered rather grimly to bet him. And then one morning at breakfast in Curzon Street, when everyone was pottering peacefully through their letters, Camilla suddenly made an odd little sound over one of hers and said, “Johnny, it’s Victor! He’s here! What do we do?”
    “What does he want?” asked Johnny, going to the point.
    “He wants to call—or whatever. He wants to be recognized. He wants to get his foot in the door, in other words.”
    “Not my door!” said Virginia promptly.
    “Ribbentrop,” said Johnny thoughtfully.
    “Yes, of course. He’s come with