And Chiquita she became.
Chiquita was beautiful. Her beauty had a highwayman quality of violence;
it struck quick and full in the face. She was the darkest of all the
girls, a raven black. As Lulu was all coppery shine and shimmer, all
satiny gloss and gleam, so Chiquita was all dusk in the coloring, all
velvet in the surfaces. Her great heavy-lidded eyes were dusk and
velvet, with depth on depth of an unmeaning dreaminess. Her hair, brows,
lashes were dusk and velvet; and there was no light in them. Her skin, a
dusky cream on which velvety shade accented velvety shadow, was
colorless except where her lips, cupped like a flower, offered a splash
of crimson. Yet, in spite of the violence of her beauty, her expression
held a tropical languor. Indeed, had not her flying compelled a
superficial vigor from her, she would have seemed voluptuous.
Chiquita wore scarlet always, the exact scarlet of her wings, a clinging
mass of tropical bloom; huge star-shaped or lilly-like flowers whose
brilliant lustre accentuated her dusky coloring.
They had no sooner accustomed themselves to the incongruity of Frank
Merrill's conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy
developed what Honey called "a case." It was scarcely a question of
development; for with Pete it had been the "thin one" from the
beginning. Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her
Clara - and Clara she ultimately became. Among themselves, the men
employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with
Pete. To Ralph she was "the cat"; to Billy, "the poser"; to Honey,
"Carrots."
Clara appeared first with Lulu. She did not stay long on her initial
visit. But afterwards she always accompanied her friend, always stayed
as late as she.
"I'd pick those two for running-mates anywhere," Ralph said in private
to Honey. "I wish I had a dollar bill for every time I've met up with
that combination, one simple, devoted, self-sacrificing, the other
selfish, calculating, catty."
Clara was not exactly beautiful, although she had many points of beauty.
Her straight red hair clung to her head like a close-fitting helmet of
copper. Her skin balanced delicately between a brown pallor and a golden
sallowness. Her long, black lashes paled her gray eyes slightly; her
snub nose made charming havoc of what, without it, would have been a
conventional regularity of profile. She was really no more slender than
the normal woman, but, compared with her mates, she seemed of elfin
slimness; she was shapely in a supple, long-limbed way. There was
something a little exotic about her. Her green and gold plumage gave her
a touch of the fantastic and the bizarre. Prevailingly, she arrayed
herself in flowers that ran all the shades from cream and lemon to
yellow and orange. She was like a parrot among more uniformly feathered
birds.