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hinted that there is another way of kissing besides the facial punch. The dab. For people like me, it is more important to be able to guess within a thousand dollars just what the bank account of a man is, or to be able to place his exact relationship to the Hohenzollerns or the Hapsburgs or maybe even the Astors by his name--than it is to consider him as a male into whose arms I might some day consign my affections. You happen to be related to the Hapsburgs. And--" "And I am fortunate enough to have affectionate arms--" "Trained all over the continent." "May I be permitted to say--applesauce!" "Certainly. Let's get all our bluffs straight at the beginning. We'll know where we stand." The Prince looked down at the table-cloth. There was a minute dissatisfaction on his face. The easy candor of the American girls whom he had met had impressed him at first. But Muriel's attitude seemed to be one either of defense or else of utter hardness. She was bowing to someone and he caught a glimpse of the straight, unsmiling mouth, the thin, level eye-brows, even while he felt his own face put on an expression of mild pleasure and his own head bend slightly. He asked one more question. "What do you want most?" "That was Mrs. Weatherbridge. She was itching to be invited here to meet you. Philadelphia sometimes reminds me of a corset stuffed with fussy dowagers. What do I want? I don't want anybody in the world to try to investigate my feelings. I have none. Excepting possibly anger." For an instant Rupert believed that it was true. He raised his eyebrows. "Finished?" he asked. In the evening Valak called at Rittenhouse Square to confer with Chloe Laforge-Leigh over arrangements. Half a dozen reporters, three of them from New York, were waiting downstairs for Mr. Leigh. The Prince had taken Muriel to the theater. Miss Laforge-Leigh wore a large gray-green comb in her hair. She received the Duke in her private drawing room and sat behind a small Louis XV desk idly waving a fan while she talked. Evening clothes, even from the masterful hand of Patou, could neither diminish nor disguise her proportions. "Did you see the evening papers, your Grace? 'Philadelphia's Royal Couple!' Sometimes these editors are rather effective. I talked to several of them--unofficially, of course, this afternoon. They importuned me." Valak nodded. "The hotel was filled with them." Miss Laforge-Leigh produced a leather-bound book. "Here is our guest list. I have checked the more important personages once and the most important twice. I thought you would care to run through it." "Naturally. The Prince's party will be small. It will be necessary, of course, to repeat the wedding in Sabria." "I assumed it would." She smiled. "There have been exceptions to that only in the case of Roland Perth of Upper Sabria and Prince Czeri during the past two centuries." "Indeed?" Valak said. "I hadn't looked--" "A conscientious study of the royal families is my dearest hobby. I could recite from memory the entire Sabrian line. Down to Counts, at the least." Valak expressed casual surprise. "Most remarkable." "As for Windsors, Hapsburgs, Bonapartes, Hohenzollerns, Bourbons--" "Most remarkable. Speaking of the newspapers, they were rather shocking in the matter of--of Miss Muriel's--ah--mother." Chloe was transiently cross. Then she accepted the interruption and became indignant over the new topic--all in the space of a second. "We were at once crushed and furious." "I thought that possibly Mr. Leigh--with his resources--could do something to quiet these journals." She stretched out the fan. "My dear Duke! If you could know how I have begged him, how I have pleaded with him--to no avail. When it happened, twenty years ago, I suggested to him that he should buy outright every newspaper that mentioned this Storey girl's name in connection with him." "But she was his wife--" Chloe smiled complacently. "It would have meant buying all the newspapers published at the time. He laughed in my face." Valak looked away from her. For him, Miss Laforge-Leigh's absurdities were more difficult to bear than the intricacies of her ethics. Valak was accustomed to invisible deviations from the path of absolute right. But in common with the rest of the world, he cordially despised Chloe in private. The single class which accepted and admitted her was composed of women like herself, of which Philadelphia society had ample numbers. Valak was, scaled by small monarchies, a shrewd statesman. For many years his fingers had been on the pulse of the small South European countries. The very present dissolution of royalty was evident to him before the war. That a map-shorn and ragged Sabria had survived at all was due largely to him. Now, however, the end was in sight. The Queen was dead, the King an invalid. The Duke remained loyal in a measure to them. He seized upon the Prince, his personality and title, as the one single hope of saving a proud name and a faltering family from [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |