"Beverly," she said, "I am ready."
Plank stood up, dazed from his reverie, and walked toward her. His white tie had become disarranged; she raised her hands, halting him, and pulled it into shape for him, consciously innocent of the intimacy.
"Thank you," he said. "Do you know how pretty you are this evening?"
"Yes; I was very happy at my mirror. Do you know, the withered years seem to be dropping from me like leaves from an autumn sapling. And I feel young enough to say so poetically. … Did Sylvia try to flirt with you over the wire?"
"Yes, as usual," he said drily, descending the stairs beside her.
"And really you don't love her any more?" she queried.
"Scarcely." His voice was low and rather disagreeable, and she looked up.
"I wish I knew what you and Sylvia find to talk about so frequently, if you're not in love."
But he made no answer; and they drove away to the Belwether house, a rather wide, old-style mansion of brown stone, with a stoop dividing its ugly façade, and a series of unnecessary glass doors blockading the vestibule.
A drawing-room and a reception-room flanked the marble-tiled hall; behind these the dining-room ran the width of the rear. It was a typical gentlefolk's house of the worst period of Manhattan, and Major Belwether belonged in it as fittingly as a melodeon belongs in a west-side flat. The hall-way was made for such a man as he to patter through; the velvet-covered stairs were as peculiarly fitted for him as a runway is for a rabbit; the suave pink-and-white drawing-room, the discreet, gray reception-room, the soft, fat rugs, the intricacies of banisters and alcoves and curtained cubby-holes--all reflected his personality, all corroborated the ensemble. It was his habitat, his distinctly, from the pronounced but meaningless intricacy of the architecture to the studied but unconvincing tints, like a man who suddenly starts to speak, but checks himself, realising he has nothing in particular to say.
There were half a dozen people there lounging informally between the living-room on the second floor and Sylvia's apartments in the rear--the residue from a luncheon and Bridge party given that afternoon by Sylvia to a score or so of card-mad women. A few of these she had asked to remain for an informal dinner, and a desperate game later--the sort of people she knew well enough to lose to heavily or win from without remorse--Grace Ferrall, Marion Page, Agatha Caithness. Trusting to the telephone that morning, she had secured the Mortimers and Quarrier, failing three men; and now the party, with Plank as Mortimer's substitute, was complete, all thorough gamesters--sex mattering nothing in the preparation for such a séance.