The Beauty and the Bolshevist

								

before she had been dancing, but not being able to find any others in
her bathhouse, she had just kept them on, recklessly ignoring the
inevitable problem of what she should wear home. She was leaning back
on her straightened arms, with her head back, looking up into the sky
and softly whistling to herself. Ben saw in a second that she was the
girl of the silver turban.
He stole nearer and nearer, cutting silently through the water, and
then, when he had looked his fill, he put his head down again, splashed
a little, and did not look up until his hand was on the raft, when he
allowed an expression of calm surprise to appear on his face.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Is this a private raft?”
The young lady, who had had plenty of time since the splash to arrange
her countenance, looked at him with a blank coldness, and then suddenly
smiled.
“I thought it was a private world,” she replied.
“It’s certainly a very agreeable one,” said Ben, climbing on the raft.
“And what I like particularly about it is the fact that no one is alive
but you and me. Newport appears to be a city of the dead.”
“It always was,” she answered, contemptuously.
“Oh, come. Not an hour ago you were dancing in blue and green and a
silver turban at a party over there,” and he waved his hand in the
direction from which he had come.
“Did you think it was a good ball?”
“I enjoyed it,” he answered, truthfully.
Her face fell. “How very disappointing,” she said. “I didn’t see you
there.”
“Disappointing that you did not see me there?”
“No,” she replied, and then, less positively; “No; I meant it was
disappointing that you were the kind of man who went to parties—and
enjoyed them.”
“It would be silly to go if you didn’t enjoy them,” he returned,
lightly.
She turned to him very seriously. “You’re right,” she said; “it is
silly—very silly, and it’s just what I do. I consider parties like that
the lowest, emptiest form of human entertainment. They’re dull; they’re
expensive; they keep you from doing intelligent things, like studying;
they keep you from doing simple, healthy things, like sleeping and
exercising; they make you artificial; they make you civil to people you
despise—they make women, at least, for we must have partners—”
“But why do you go, then?”
She was silent, and they looked straight and long at each other. Then
she said, gravely:
“The answer’s very humiliating. I go because I haven’t anything else to
do.”
He did not reassure her. “Yes, that’s bad,” he said, after a second.
“But of course you could not expect to have anything else to do when
all your time is taken up like that. ‘When the half gods go,’ you know,
‘the gods arrive.’”
The quotation was not new to Crystal; in fact, she had quoted it to
Eddie not very long before, apropos of another girl to whom he had