Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 7

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Mary Agnes lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling. Mims Newman, she reflected, had been remarkably prompt with her invitation: and in its way this was quite a high compliment, proof that Mrs. Wistart Wedge was sought-after, even here on the Coast. But why not? She had been coming to California for years; and she had friends who were rather important socially in Beverly Hills, Westwood, Bel-Air, Hollywood, and other places in this crazily far-flung sprawl of population known collectively as Los Angeles. She dressed as well as the best, could be charming when she wished, and knew how to lift a conversation from banalities to a bright, even a daring plane. And she had money, which counted nowhere more heavily than in this money-hungry film capital.

But another thought gave her less satisfaction: the news about Erskine de Lacey.

Mims had suggested having one of Mary Agnes’ masculine acquaintances pick her up and bring her to the cocktail party. It was a usual procedure, and Mary Agnes accepted escorts on occasion if they were entertaining and well groomed and unattached and behaved themselves at least moderately well. In Jericho, of course, she would not have dreamed of it, because Jericho would have been aghast.

But she enjoyed society; and she disliked going unaccompanied to places, especially here in Los Angeles. It offended her aesthetic taste. A women by herself was somehow incomplete, a half creature socially, like a statue which is beautiful from one angle only. She is, furthermore, the object of a faint shadow of something combined of pity and contempt from her own sex, a thin feeling more an instinct than a thought, as if she were unable to interest any man, and therefore were a failure in her femininity. This was not true, of course; but Mary Agnes acknowledged the implication, and here, more than fifteen hundred miles from home, she saw no harm in accepting, without any false hesitation, invitations of various kinds, with the companionship of men as a corollary, to parties and night clubs and even, on one occasion, a weekend yachting cruise over to Catalina Island.

Masculine attention was easy to attract if one was a wealthy, well-dressed, and amusing woman, very much the mistress of her own actions, and with a husband half a continent away. Mary Agnes was nothing of the prude, and found it amusing to play the game of coquetry with her companion of the evening—if she was in the mood—being quite secure in her ability at the end to keep the situation under control.

The woman is, after all, the final arbiter in such matters: and perhaps it was fastidiousness, and perhaps it was a definitely arrived at policy against becoming involved in any personal entanglements, and perhaps it was simply a coolness of temperament that never permitted Mary Agnes to warm, even when her companion was most attractive and showed an inclination to warmth.

This coolness she possessed in an abundant degree. In dealing with men she found it rather an asset: she could sometimes excite their emotional interest merely by being indifferent to them. She gained a certain pleasure out of arousing and thus subduing a man without any intention of rewarding him, but only for the sense of power over him that it gave her. She herself felt no emotion, she only played at emotion as a game, a technique.

All of this, curiously, gave Mary Agnes a pleasant sort of character in Hollywood and Beverly Hills circles: a woman young enough to be interesting, yet old enough to be wise; amusing, gay, and playful, even a bit daring to a certain point without being stupid about it. And furthermore, unattainable—which in itself made her a challenge to some men, particularly in Hollywood, where wolf reputations are highly prized.

The same sort of behavior at home in Jericho, of course, would have given her quite another kind of character: and the realization that Erskine de Lacey, with whom she had gone out perhaps more frequently than with any other man in Los Angeles, had been carried off to Jericho by that egregious old frump and almost pathological prude, Mrs. Simon Bolivar Butford, was slightly disquieting.

This was for a reason beyond the mere fact that Erskine had been her squire frequently and at many places. She supposed he had the good taste to keep that to himself, and even if he spoke about it she could shrug the matter off.

Something else concerned her more deeply. In all her visits to Los Angeles she had conducted herself with such excellent judgment and coolness, even when she drank rather more than was good for her, that she could think of only one indiscretion she had committed.

One indiscretion. One wild prank—it was really no more than that—carried out on a night when the treacherous fumes of rum drinks, concocted to delight and betray, wreathed through her brain, filling her with laughter and recklessness, a momentary discounting of consequences in the impulse to do something unconventional, something that seemed daring and fun at the time. Nothing very terrible; yet a little embarrassing to look back on. An act of rebellion against all the metes and bounds of custom, carried perhaps a step too far.

Erskine de Lacey ... that strange soul, Erskine de Lacey. She could not yet quite understand herself or the thing that had happened between them.