From somewhere in the room came a voice.
"Did they ever catch that crook, Athalie?"
"Which?"
"The Fifty-ninth Street safe-blower?"
"Yes."
"Did you find him?"
She nodded.
"How? In your crystal?" I asked.
"Yes, he was there."
"It's odd," mused Duane, "that you can never do anything of advantage to yourself by gazing into your crystal."
"It's the invariable limit to clairvoyance," she remarked.
"A sort of penalty for being super-gifted," added Stafford.
"Perhaps… We can't help ourselves."
"It's too bad," I volunteered.
"Oh, I don't care," she said, with a slight shrug of her pretty shoulders.
"Come," said somebody, teasingly, "wouldn't you like to know how soon you are going to fall in love, and with whom?"
She laughed, dropped her cigarette into a silver bowl, stretched her arms above her head, straightened her slender figure, turned her head and looked at us.
"No," she said, "I do not wish to know. Light is swift; Thought is swifter; but Love is the swiftest thing in Life, and if it is now travelling toward me, it will strike me soon enough to suit me."
Stafford leaned forward and arranged the cushions for her; she sank back among them, her dark eyes still on us.
"Hours are slow," she said; "years are slower, but the slowest thing in Life is Love. If it is now travelling toward me, it will reach me soon enough to suit me."
"I," said Duane, "prefer quick action, O Athalie, the Beautiful!"
"Athalie, lovely and incomparable," said Stafford, "I, also, prefer quick action."
"Play Scheherazade for us, Athalie," I said, "else we slay you with our compliments."
A voice or two from distant corners repeated the menace. A match flared and a fresh cigarette glowed faintly.
Somebody brought the tripod with its crystal sphere and set it down in the middle of the room. Its mild rays fell on the marble basin of the tiny fountain, – Duane's offering. The goldfish which I had given her were floating there fast asleep.
When we had placed sweetmeats and cigarettes convenient for her, we all, in turn, with circumstance and ceremony, bent over her left hand where it rested listlessly among the cushions, saluting the emerald on her third finger with our lips.
Then the dim circle closed around her, nearer.
"Of all the visions which have passed before your eyes within the depths of that crystal globe," said Duane, " – of all the histories of men and women which, unsuspected by them, you have witnessed, seated here in this silent, silk-hung place, we desire to hear only those in which Fate has been swiftest, Opportunity a loosened arrow, Destiny a flash of lightning."
"But the victims of quick action must be nameless, except as I choose to mask them," she said, looking dreamily into her crystal.
After a moment's silence Duane said in a low voice:
"Does anybody notice the odour of orange blossoms?"
We all noticed the fragrance.
"I seem to catch a whiff of the sea, also," ventured Stafford. "Am I right?"
"Yes," she nodded, "you will notice the odour of the semi-tropics, even if you miss the point of everything I tell you."
"In other words," said I, "we are but a material bunch, Athalie, and may be addressed and amused only through our physical senses. Very well: transpose from the spiritual for us if you please a little story of quick action which has happened here in the crystal under your matchless eyes!"
II
With her silver tongs she selected a sweetmeat. When it had melted in her sweeter mouth, she lighted a cigarette, saluted us with a gay little gesture and smilingly began:
"Don't ask me how I know what these people said; that is my concern, not yours. Don't ask me how I know what unspoken thoughts animated these people; that is my affair. Nor how I seem to be perfectly acquainted with their past histories; for that is part of my profession."
"And still the wonder grew," commented the novelist tritely, "that one small head could carry all she knew!"
"Why," asked Stafford, "do you refuse to reveal your secret? Do you no longer trust us, Athalie?"
She answered: "Comment prétendons-nous qu'un autre garde notre secret, si nous n'avons pas pu le garder nous-même?"
Nobody replied.
"Now," she said, laughingly, "I will tell you all that I know about the Orange Puppy."
Plans for her first debut began before her birth. When it became reasonably certain that she was destined to decorate the earth, she was entered on the waiting lists of two schools – The Dinglenook School for Boys, and The Idlebrook Institute for Young Ladies – her parents taking no chances, but playing both ends coming and going.
When ultimately she made her first earthly appearance, and it was apparent that she was destined to embellish the planet in the guise of a girl, the process of grooming her for her second debut, some eighteen years in the future, began. She lived in sanitary and sterilized seclusion, eating by the ounce, sleeping through accurately measured minutes, every atom of her anatomy inspected daily, every pore of her skin explored, every garment she wore weighed, every respiration, pulse beat, and fluctuation of bodily temperature carefully noted and discussed.
When she appeared her hair was black. After she shed this, it came in red; when she was eight her hair was coppery, lashes black, eyes blue, and her skin snow and wild-strawberry tints in agreeably delicate nuances. Several millions were set aside to grow up with her and for her. Also, the list of foreign and aristocratic babyhood was scanned and several dozen possibilities checked off – the list running from the progeny of down-and-out monarchs with a sporting chance for a crown, to the more solid infant aristocracy of Britain.
At the age of nine, the only symptom of intellect that had yet appeared in her was a superbly developed temper. That year she eluded a governess and two trained nurses in the park, and was discovered playing with some unsterilized children near the duck-pond, both hands full of slime and pollywogs.
It was the only crack in the routine through which she ever crawled. Lessons daily in riding, driving, dancing, fencing, gymnastics, squash, tennis, skating, plugged every avenue of escape between morning school and evening sleep, after a mental bath in sterilized literature. Once, out of the window she saw a fire. This event, with several runaways on the bridle-path, included the sensations of her life up to her release from special instructors, and her entry into Idlebrook Institute.
Here she did all she could to misbehave in a blind and instinctive fashion, but opportunities were pitiably few; and by the time she had graduated, honest deviltry seemed to have been starved out of her; and a half year's finishing abroad apparently eliminated it, leaving only a half-confused desire to be let alone. But solitude was the luxury always denied her.
Unlike the usual debutante, who is a social veteran two years before her presentation, and who at eighteen lacks no experience except intellectual, Miss Cassillis had become neither a judge of champagne nor an expert in the various cabaret steps popular at country houses and the more exclusive dives.
"Mother," she said calmly, on her eighteenth birthday, "do you know that I am known among my associates as a dead one?" At which that fat and hard-eyed matron laughed, surveying her symmetrical daughter with grim content.
"Let me tell you something," she said. "America, socially, is only one vast cabaret, mostly consisting of performers. The spectators are few. You're one. Conditions are reversed across the water;