The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [4891]
"This girl you spoke about, that was the business you mentioned?"
"Yes." She hesitated. "I could have asked you that over the telephone, couldn't I? The plain truth is that I've had two bad months - never mind why, and Christmas was coming, and - I just wanted to see your perfectly sane and normal face again."
"I wish you'd let me know sooner where you were."
She evaded his eyes.
"I was getting settled, and studying, and learning to knit, and - oh, I'm the most wretched knitter, Clay! I just stick at it doggedly. I say to myself that hands that can play golf, and use a pen, and shoot, and drive a car, have got to learn to knit. But look here!"
She held up a forlorn looking sock to his amused gaze. "And I think I'm a clever woman."
"You're a very brave woman, Audrey," he said. "You'll let me come back, won't you?"
"Heavens, yes. Whenever you like. And I'm going to stop being a recluse. I just wanted to think over some things."
On the way home he stopped at his florist's, and ordered a mass of American beauties for her on Christmas morning. She had sent her love to Natalie, so that night he told Natalie he had seen her, and such details of her life as he knew.
"I'm glad she's coming to her senses," Natalie said. "Everything's been deadly dull without her. She always made things go - I don't know just how," she added, as if she had been turning her over in her mind. "What sort of business did she want to see you about?"
"She has a girl she wants to get into the mill."
"Good gracious, she must be changed," said Natalie. And proceeded - she was ready to go out to dinner - to one of her long and critical surveys of herself in the cheval mirror. Recently those surveys had been rather getting on Clayton's nerves. She customarily talked, not to him, but to his reflection over her shoulder, when, indeed, she took her eyes from herself.
"I wonder," she said, fussing with a shoulder-strap, "who Audrey will marry if anything happens to Chris?"
She saw his face and raised her eyebrows.
"You needn't scowl like that. He's quite as likely as not never to come back, isn't he? And Audrey didn't care a pin for him."
"We're talking rather lightly of a very terrible thing, aren't we?"
"Oh, you're not," she retorted. "You think just the same things as I do, but you're not so open about them. That's all"
CHAPTER XI
Graham was engaged. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. His affair with Marion had been, up to the very moment of his blurted - out "I want you," as light-hearted as that of any of the assorted young couples who flirted and kissed behind the closed doors of that popular house.
The crowd which frequented the Hayden home was gay, tolerant and occasionally nasty. It made ardent love semi-promiscuously, it drank rather more than it should, and its desire for a good time often brought it rather close to the danger line. It did not actually step over, but it hovered gayly on the brink.
And Toots remained high-priestess of her little cult. The men liked her. The girls imitated her. And Graham, young as he was, seeing her popularity, was vastly gratified to find himself standing high in her favor.
Marion was playing for the stake of the Spencer money. In her intimate circle every one knew it but Graham.
"How's every little millionaire?" was Tommy Hale's usual greeting.
She knew only one way to handle men, and with the stake of the Spencer money she tried every lure of her experience on Graham. It was always Marion who on cold nights sat huddled against him in the back seat of the Hayden's rather shabby car, her warm ungloved hand in his. It was Marion who taught him to mix the newest of cocktails, and who later praised his skill. It was Marion who insisted on his having a third, too, when the second had already set his ears drumming.
The effect on the boy of her steady propinquity, of her constant caressing touches,