The Beauty and the Bolshevist

								

reminiscent of the days when the South patronized Newport, and turned
into Bellevue Avenue—past shops with names familiar to Fifth Avenue,
past a villa with bright-eyed owls on the gateposts, past many large,
silent houses and walled gardens.
The air was very cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering
bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path. Then suddenly the
whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in “Faust”
when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge
headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the
asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the
hydrangea bushes. They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of
velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief—so small that the lighted
windows were plainly visible from the road.
“Stop,” said Ben to his driver. He had suddenly realized how long it
must be before he could rouse the Cord household.
He paid his driver, got out, and made his way up the driveway toward
the house. Groups of chauffeurs were standing about their
cars—vigorous, smartly dressed men, young for the most part. Ben
wondered if it were possible that they were content with the present
arrangement, and whether their wives and children were not stifling in
the city at that very moment. He caught a sentence here and there as he
passed. “And, believe me,” one was saying, “as soon as he got into the
box he did not do a thing to that fellar from Tiverton—” Ben’s
footsteps lagged a little. He was a baseball fan. He almost forgave the
chauffeurs for being content. They seemed to him human beings, after
all.
He approached the house, and, walking past a narrow, unroofed piazza,
he found himself opposite a long window. He looked straight into the
ballroom. The ball was a fancy ball—the best of the season. It was
called a Balkan Ball, which gave all the guests the opportunity of
dressing pretty much as they pleased. The wood of the long paneled room
was golden, and softened the light from the crystal appliques along the
wall, and set off the bright dresses of the dancers as a gold bowl sets
off the colors of fruit.
Every now and then people stepped out on the piazza, and as they did
they became audible to Ben for a few seconds. First, two middle-aged
men, solid, bronzed, laughing rather wickedly together. Ben drew back,
afraid of what he might overhear, but it turned out to be no very
guilty secret. “My dear fellow,” one was saying, “I gave him a stroke a
hole, and he’s twenty years younger than I am—well, fifteen anyhow. The
trouble with these young men is that they lack—”
Ben never heard what it was that young men lacked.
Next came a boy and a girl, talking eagerly, the girl’s hand
gesticulating at her round, red lips. Ben had no scruples in
overhearing them—theirs appeared to be the universal secret. But here