II

Summer had not yet come. But May had and, with it, an eager glitter, skies of silk, all the caresses and surrenders of spring.

The season was becoming to Fanny. She fitted in it. She was a young Venus in Paris clothes⁠—Aphrodite a maiden, touched up by Doucet. In her manner was a charm quite incandescent. In her voice were intonations that conveyed the sensation of a kiss. Her eyes were very loquacious. She could, when she chose, flood them with languors. She could, too, charge them with rebuke. You never knew, though, just what she would do. But you always did know what Sylvia would not.

Sylvia suggested the immateriality that the painters of long ago gave to certain figures which they wished to represent as floating from the canvas into space. You felt that her mind was clean as wholesome fruit, that her speech could no more weary than could a star, that her heart, like her house, was a home. She detained, but Fanny allured.

In spite of which or perhaps precisely because of their sheer dissimilarity the two girls were friends. But association weaves mysterious ties. It unites people who otherwise would come to blows. Fanny and Sylvia had been brought up together. The mesh woven in younger days was about them still, and on this particular noon in May they made a picture which, while contrasting, was charmful.

“You really like my hat?”

The hat was gray. The girl’s dress was gray. The skirt was of the variety known as trotabout. The whole thing was severely plain, yet astonishingly smart. Sylvia was also in street dress. The latter was black.

They were in the parlor. For in New York there are still parlors. And why not? A parlor⁠—or parloir ⁠—is a talking-place. Yet in this instance not a gay place. It was spacious, sombre, severe.