The Beauty and the Bolshevist

								

again he was wrong. She was saying: “Round and round—not up and down.
My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round—”
Then two young men—boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips; they
were saying, “I haven’t pitched a game since before the war, but he
said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so—” Ben saw that he
was in the presence of the hero of the late game. He forgave him, too.
As a matter of fact, he had never given the fashionable world enough
attention to hate it. He knew that Leo Klein derived a very revivifying
antagonism from reading about it, and often bought himself an entrance
to the opera partly because he loved music, but partly, Ben always
thought, because he liked to look up at the boxes and hate the
occupants for their jewels and inattention. But Ben watched the
spectacle with as much detachment as he would have watched a spring
dance among the Indians.
And then suddenly his detachment melted away, for a lovely girl came
through the window—lovely with that particular and specific kind of
loveliness which Ben thought of when he used the word—his kind. He
used to wonder afterward how he had known it at that first glimpse,
for, in the dim light of the piazza, he could not see some of her
greatest beauties—the whiteness of her skin, white as milk where her
close, fine, brown hair began, or the blue of the eyes set at an angle
which might have seemed Oriental in eyes less enchanting turquoise in
color. But he could see her slenderness and grace. She was dressed in
clinging blues and greens and she wore a silver turban. She leaned her
hands on the railings—she turned them out along the railings; they were
slender and full of character—not soft. Ben looked at the one nearest
him. With hardly more than a turn of his head he could have kissed it.
The idea appealed to him strongly; he played with it, just as when he
was a child in a college town he had played with the idea of getting up
in church and walking about on the backs of the pews. This would be
pleasanter, and the subsequent getaway even easier. He glanced at the
dark lawn behind him; there appeared to be no obstacle to escape.
Perhaps, under the spell of her attraction for him, and the knowledge
that he would never see her again, he might actually have done it, but
she broke the trance by speaking to a tall, stolid young man who was
with her.
“No, Eddie,” she said, as if answering something he had said some time
ago, “I really was at home, at just the time I said, only this new
butler does hate you so—”
“You might speak to him about it—you might even get rid of him,”
replied the young man, in the tone of one deeply imposed upon.
“Good butlers are so rare nowadays.”
“And are devoted friends so easy to find?”
“No, but a good deal easier than butlers, Eddie dear.”
The young man gave an exclamation of annoyance. “Let us find some place