“Mother never spanks me,” Linda replied with dignity.
“If you were my little girl,” said Miss Skillern, with rolling lips, “I'd put you over my knee with your skirts up and paddle you.”
Never, Linda thought, had she heard anything worse; she was profoundly shocked. The vision of Miss Skillern performing such an operation as she had described cut its horror on her mind. There was a sinking at her heart and a misty threat of tears.
To avert this she walked slowly away. It was hardly past nine o'clock; her mother wouldn't be back for a long while, and she was too restless and unhappy to sit quietly above. Instead, she continued down to the floor where there were various games in the corridor leading to the billiard-room. The hall was dull, no one was clicking the balls about the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in a chair across from the cigar-stand.
He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gaze arrested by her irresolute passage. “Hello, Bellina,” he said.
She stopped. “Linda,” she corrected him, “Linda Condon.” Obeying a sudden impulse, she dropped, with a sigh, into a place beside him.
“You're bored,” he went on, the magazine put away. “So am I, but my term is short.”
She wondered, principally, what he was doing, among so many women, at the Boscombe. He was different from Mr. Jasper, or the other men with fat stomachs, the old men with dragging feet. It embarrassed her to meet his gaze, it was so—so investigating. She guessed he was by the sea because he felt as badly as he looked. He asked surprisingly:
“Why are you here?”
“On the account of my mother,” she explained. “But it doesn't matter much where I am. Places are all alike,” she continued conversationally. “We're mostly at hotels—Florida in winter and Lake George in summer. This is kind of between.”
“Oh!” he said; and she was sure, from that short single exclamation, he understood everything.
“Like all true beauty,” he added, “it's plain that you are durable.”
“I don't like the seashore,” she went on easily; “I'd rather be in a garden with piles of flowers and a big hedge.”
“Have you ever lived in a garden-close?”
“No,” she admitted; “it's just an idea. I told mother but she laughed at me and said a roof-garden was her choice.”
“Some day you'll have the place you describe,” he assured her. “It is written all over you. I would like to see you, Bellina, in a space of emerald sod and geraniums.” She decided to accept without further protest his name for her. “You are right, too, about the hedge—the highest and thickest in creation. I should recommend a pseudo-classic house, Georgian, rather small, a white façade against the grass. A Jacobean dining-room, dark certainly, the French windows open on dipping candle flames. You'd wear white, with your hair low and the midnight bang as it is now.”
“That would be awfully nice,” Linda replied vaguely. She sighed.
“But a very light drawing-room!” he cried. “White panels and arches and Canton-blue rugs—the brothers Adam. A fluted mantel, McIntires, and a brass hod. Curiously enough, I always see you in the evening … at the piano. I'm not so bored, now.” Little flames of red burned in either thin cheek. “What nonsense!” Suddenly he was tired. “This is a practical and earnest world,” his voice grew thin and hurt her. “Yet beauty is relentless. You'll have your garden, but I shouldn't be surprised at difficulties first.”
“It won't be so hard to get,” she declared confidently. “I mean to choose the right man. Mother says that's the answer. Women, she says, won't use their senses.”
“Ah.”
Linda began to think this was a most unpleasant monosyllable.
“So that's the lay! Has she succeeded?”
“She has a splendid time. She's out tonight with Mr. Jasper in a rolling chair, and he has loads and loads of money. It makes all the other women cross.”
“Here you are, then, till she gets back?”
“There's no one else.”
“But, as a parent, infinitely preferable to the righteous,” he murmured. “And you—”
“I think mother's perfect,” she answered simply.
He shook his head. “You won't succeed at it, though. Your mother, for example, isn't dark.”
“The loveliest gold hair,” she said ecstatically. “She's much much prettier than I'll ever be.”
“Prettier, yes. The trouble is, you are lovely, magical. You will stay for a lifetime in the memory. The merest touch of you will be more potent than any duty or fidelity. A man's only salvation will be his blindness.”
Although she didn't understand a word of this, Linda liked to hear him; he was talking as though she were grown up, and in response to the flattery she was magnetic and eager.
“One time,” he said, “very long ago, beauty was worshiped. Men, you see, know better now. They want their dollar's worth. The world was absolutely different then—there were deep adventurous forests with holy chapels in the green combe for an orison, and hermits rising to Paradise on the Te Deum Laudamus of the angels and archangels. There were black castles and, in the broad meadows, silk tents with ivory pegs and poles of gold.
“The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhaps the loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle cloth of red samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard with yellow eyes, lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes and flowers and magical herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe would weep, begging you to pierce her with your sword, and, when you did, there knelt the daughter of the King of Wales.
“But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Plato started it although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for the creed. He lived in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostly at Florence in the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico della Mirandola. Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body.”
He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow.
“Love,” he said again, and then paused. “One set of words will do as well as another. You will understand, or not, with something far different from intellectual comprehension. The endless service of beauty. Of course, a woman—but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the sacred symbol of the dollar.
“It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long ago, understood. … A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism.”
Linda said, “Very well, I won't.”
He nodded. “No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in the history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched them. Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone—banished by the other destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly, since it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful was turned into a dogma for politics and priests.
“You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at you, lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons on a sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally fragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim vision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be, sent across the world of steel at death. And then, in the