Vision House

								

after they had been in the Severance family for any length of time. The
beautiful Greek woman's handsome son had pale olive skin, a straight
nose, full red lips under a miniature moustache like two inked
finger-prints, raven hair sleekly brushed straight back from his square
forehead, and immense eyes of unfathomable blackness.
He was going to "the States" on some military mission, no one knew quite
what, and so, although the war had finished months ago, he was still in
uniform, with the "brass hat" of a staff officer, and the gorgeous
grey-lavender overcoat of the Guards. It seemed as if nobody could help
admiring him, and nobody did help it, except a great, hulking chap in
abominable clothes, with a khaki-coloured handkerchief round his neck
instead of a collar. This beast--in a sat-on-looking cap, enough to
disgrace a commercial traveller, sleeves as much too short for his
red-brown wrists as were the trousers for his strapping ankles--strode
to and fro along the deck as if for a wager. It was almost as if he
flaunted himself in defiance of someone or something. Yet he didn't
appear self-conscious. He had in his yellow-grey eyes that
bored-with-humanity look of a lion in a zoo, who gazes past crowds to
the one vision he desires--the desert. Only, now and then as he passed
the chair of Lord Severance, his look came back for an instant from the
desert, or waste of waves, to shoot scorn at a pair of well-shod feet
crossed on a black fur rug. This would hardly indicate any emotion
higher than jealousy, it seemed, as the boots of Major Lord Severance
were perfect, and his own were vile.
When Severance had restlessly occupied his chair for fifteen minutes he
suddenly sprang up. A maid, unmistakably French, was squeezing a load of
rugs through a doorway. Severance ignored the offered service of a deck
steward, as if the rugs were too sacred for human hands to touch. With a
kind smile he himself helped the woman in black to spread the soft,
furry folds over the two neighbouring chairs.
"It's like a scene on the stage in a play written for her," said one
American Red Cross nurse to another. "The hero of the piece and the maid
working up the woman star's entrance."
"Which is he, more like hero or villain?" the second nurse reflected
aloud. "If I wrote him into a play, he'd be the villain--that dark type
with red lips and a little black moustache. But the Sorel's a star all
right. We ought to tune up and whistle a bar of entrance music! See how
the French maid puts the brown rug on one chair and the blue rugs on the
other. What'll you bet Sorel and her mother aren't dressed one in blue
and one in brown? Gee! The biggest blue rug's lined with chinchilla. Can
you beat it?"
Neither nurse could beat it, but the approaching vision could. She beat
it with a long cloak of even more silvery chinchilla.
At the door she stood aside for an older, shorter, plumper woman to
pass, she herself being very tall and exquisitely slender. She did not