Free The Magpies Nest by Isabel Paterson Page A

him.
    "Oh, well—he likes you, too. And he doesn't get on with his wife.. And he hasn't got a girl here." This was elemental logic with a vengeance. But the force of it could not appeal to any unawakened girl.
    "Well, I don't see," she murmured vaguely. "I think he's nice. He is to me. Has he got..."
    "Sure, he's all right," said Allen. "He had a girl in St. Paul, I believe. But that was awhile ago."
    "I'm not his girl," affirmed Hope.
    "All right," said Allen. Allen played the cards as they fell. "I believe you, if you say so. You can't ever tell. I wish you liked me."
    "I do," she said instantly.
    "Oh, shucks!" said Allen. "You're a funny girl, aren't you?" And he retreated into silence for a time.
    "You talk," she said finally, with a rather hopeless air, "as if one had to..."
    "Oh, well, not just exactly that," he admitted. "But —life's pretty lonesome. ... I like a girl . . . near me. ... I used to know a lot of chorus girls in Chicago; jolly kids. . . "
    He was sufficiently explicit, until she mutely signed "enough." Yet there was something primitively clear in his confession. She regarded him with utter astonishment, unaware that she had often aroused the same sentiment in him.
    "I think I rather like being alone, mostly," she said at last.
    "Sure, I know," he assented. "I can feel it. You're away off. You're a funny girl."
    It was two o'clock. And there was her front gate. 

CHAPTER VIII
    THE dressing-room was uncomfortably crowded; Hope found herself in a corner, remote from a mirror and reluctant to take off her wrap lest her assurance should go with it. The dreadful feeling of being alone in a crowd assailed her; she felt gooseflesh rising on her bare shoulders, and looked about: despairingly for Mrs. Patten and Mary. They had promised to be there, and were late. Eleanor Travers nodded casually, and went on powdering her nose. Mrs. Shane appraised her with a long, insolently inexpressive look and then turned, with an air of contempt, and adjusted her gown over her hips with a slight wriggling movement. Hope decided she would be no more beautiful for seeing her own reflection once more, and made her way to the door.
    While she waited, drawing on her gloves, she could see Ned Angell at the door of the other cloak-room, evidently not yet expecting her; he had his hand on the shoulder of another youth, and they were both laughing, but in a confidential manner, as over a private joke. So it was, rather, though of course Hope could not know; they had just returned it to Ned's topcoat pocket. Ned was in flannels, as were many of the younger men: he even had a cummerbund instead of a waistcoat, but he carried off his dandyism extremely well, as a few men can, by appearing unconscious of it. Hope thought she had never seen anyone look quite so "finished" as he did; she ever forgave him for wearing a seal ring on his little finger, and that his hard was too small for a man's. His mouse-coloured hair, brushed very sleek, had a high light to it, like lacquer. He looked incredibly useless and gay; and was both But for a cavalier at a dance, he was all one could ask, and more, Hope felt, than one so country-cousinish as herself had a right to. Now he saw her, and came across the room, and carried her off on his arm.
    Inside the ball-room, a long bare apartment meagrely festooned with dusty-looking bunting and forlorn strings of Japanese lanterns against a glaring white wall, she hesitated again, not knowing whither Ned was guiding her but aware of some immediate duty on his mind. He was taking her to the patronesses, and she stumbled her way past them in an agony of embarrassment, tearing a flounce on the sharp heel of her slipper as she bowed to them. She got another glance of appraisal there, from Mrs. Dupont, who was Cora Shane's bosom friend—a simile which in that respect implied an amplitude of affection on the part of both. A new girl to them was a thing to be considered. Mrs. Dupont, who looked like a Spanish beauty