The Flirt - Booth Tarkington

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Corliss spared the fraction of a second for another glance at the rose in the waste-basket.

      The girl saw him before she reached the table, gave a little gasp of surprise, and halted with one hand carried prettily to her breast.

      “Oh!” she said impulsively; “I beg your pardon. I didn’t know there was—— I was looking for a book I thought I——”

      She stopped, whelmed with a breath-taking shyness, her eyes, after one quick but condensed encounter with those of Mr. Corliss, falling beneath exquisite lashes. Her voice was one to stir all men: it needs not many words for a supremely beautiful “speaking-voice” to be recognized for what it is; and this girl’s was like herself, hauntingly lovely. The intelligent young man immediately realized that no one who heard it could ever forget it.

      “I see,” she faltered, turning to leave the room; “it isn’t here—the book.”

      “There’s something else of yours here,” said Corliss.

      “Is there?” She paused, hesitating at the door, looking at him over her shoulder uncertainly.

      “You dropped this rose.” He lifted the rose from the waste-basket and repeated the bow he had made at the front door. This time it was not altogether wasted.

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      “Yes. You lost it. It belongs to you.”

      “Yes—it does. How curious!” she said slowly. “How curious it happened to be there!” She stepped to take it from him, her eyes upon his in charming astonishment. “And how odd that——” She stopped; then said quickly:

      “How did you know it was my rose?”

      “Any one would know!”

      Her expression of surprise was instantaneously merged in a flash of honest pleasure and admiration, such as only an artist may feel in the presence of a little masterpiece by a fellow-craftsman.

      Happily, anticlimax was spared them by the arrival of the person for whom the visitor had asked at the door, and the young man retained the rose in his hand.

      Mr. Madison, a shapeless hillock with a large, harassed, red face, evidently suffered from the heat: his gray hair was rumpled back from a damp forehead; the sleeves of his black alpaca coat were pulled up to the elbow above his uncuffed white shirtsleeves; and he carried in one mottled hand the ruins of a palm-leaf fan, in the other a balled wet handkerchief which released an aroma of camphor upon the banana-burdened air. He bore evidences of inadequate adjustment after a disturbed siesta, but, exercising a mechanical cordiality, preceded himself into the room by a genial half-cough and a hearty, “Well-well-well,” as if wishing to indicate a spirit of polite, even excited, hospitality.

      “I expected you might be turning up, after your letter,” he said, shaking hands. “Well, well, well! I remember you as a boy. Wouldn’t have known you, of course; but I expect you’ll find the town about as much changed as you are.”

      With a father’s blindness to all that is really vital, he concluded his greeting inconsequently: “Oh, this is my little girl Cora.”

      “Run along, little girl,” said the fat father.

      His little girl’s radiant glance at the alert visitor imparted her thorough comprehension of all the old man’s absurdities, which had reached their climax in her dismissal. Her parting look, falling from Corliss’s face to the waste-basket at his feet, just touched the rose in his hand as she passed through the door.

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      Cora paused in the hall at a point about twenty feet from the door, a girlish stratagem frequently of surprising advantage to the practitioner; but the two men had begun to speak of the weather. Suffering a momentary disappointment, she went on, stepping silently, and passed through a door at the end of the hall into a large and barren looking dining-room, stiffly and skimpily furnished, but well-lighted, owing to the fact that one end of it had been transformed into a narrow “conservatory,” a glass alcove now tenanted by two dried palms and a number of vacant jars and earthen crocks.

      Here her sister sat by an open window, repairing masculine underwear; and a handsome, shabby, dirty boy of about thirteen sprawled on the floor of the “conservatory” unloosing upon its innocent, cracked, old black and white tiles a ghastly family of snakes, owls, and visaged crescent moons, in orange, green, and other loathsome chalks. As Cora entered from the hall, a woman of fifty came in at a door opposite, and, a dust-cloth retained under her left arm, an unsheathed weapon ready for emergency, leaned sociably against the door-casing and continued to polish a tablespoon with a bit of powdered chamois-skin. She was tall and slightly bent; and, like the flat, old, silver spoon in her hand, seemed to have been worn thin by use; yet it was plain that the three young people in the room “got their looks” from her. Her eyes, if tired, were tolerant and fond; and her voice held its youth and something of the music of Cora’s.

      “What is he like?” She addressed the daughter by the window.

      “Why don’t you ask Coralie?” suggested the sprawling artist, relaxing his hideous labour. He pronounced his sister’s name with intense bitterness. He called it “Cora-lee,” with an implication far from subtle that his sister had at some time thus Gallicized herself, presumably for masculine favour; and he was pleased to receive tribute to his satire in a flash of dislike from her lovely eyes.

      “I ask Laura because it was Laura who went to the door,” Mrs. Madison answered. “I do not ask Cora because Cora hasn’t seen him. Do I satisfy you, Hedrick?”

      “`Cora hasn’t seen him!’ ” the boy hooted mockingly. “She hasn’t? She was peeking out of the library shutters when he came up the front walk, and she wouldn’t let me go to the door; she told Laura to go, but first she took the library waste-basket and laid one o’ them roses——”

      “Those roses,” said Cora sharply. “He will hang around the neighbours’ stables. I think you ought to do something about it, mother.”

      “Them roses!” repeated Hedrick fiercely. “One o’ them roses Dick Lindley sent her this morning. Laid it in the waste-basket and sneaked it into the reception room for an excuse to go galloping in and——”

      “`Galloping’?” said Mrs. Madison gravely.

      “It was a pretty bum excuse,” continued the unaffected youth, “but you bet your life you’ll never beat our Cora-lee when there’s a person in pants on the premises! It’s sickening.” He rose, and performed something like a toe-dance, a supposed imitation of his sister’s mincing approach to the visitor. “Oh, dear, I am such a little sweety! Here I am all alone just reeking with Browning-and-Tennyson and thinking to myself about such lovely things, and walking around looking for my nice, pretty rose. Where can it be? Oh heavens, Mister, are you here? Oh my, I never, never thought that there was a man here! How you frighten me! See what a shy little thing I am? You do see, don’t you, old sweeticums? Ta, ta, here’s papa. Remember me by that rose, ‘cause it’s just like me. Me and it’s twins, you see, cutie-sugar!” The diabolical boy then concluded with a reversion to the severity of his own manner: “If she was my daughter I’d whip her!”

      His indignation was left in the air, for the three ladies had instinctively united against him, treacherously including his private feud in the sex-war of the ages: Cora jumped lightly upon the table and sat whistling and polishing the nails of one hand upon the palm of another; Laura continued to sew without looking up, and

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