"And then I'll come along," remarked Dick, "and picking up the obsolete name, Jewel, I'll attach it to some quaint and attractive character and it'll start its career all over again."
Her voice took up the thread of subject and wove along with faintly upturning, half-humorous intonations for sentence ends--as though defying interruption--and intervals of shadowy laughter. Dick had told her that Anthony's man was named Bounds--she thought that was wonderful! Dick had made some sad pun about Bounds doing patchwork, but if there was one thing worse than a pun, she said, it was a person who, as the inevitable come-back to a pun, gave the perpetrator a mock-reproachful look.
"Where are you from?" inquired Anthony. He knew, but beauty had rendered him thoughtless.
"Kansas City, Missouri."
"They put her out the same time they barred cigarettes."
"Did they bar cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather."
"He's a reformer or something, isn't he?"
"I blush for him."
"So do I," she confessed. "I detest reformers, especially the sort who try to reform me."
"Are there many of those?"
"Dozens. It's 'Oh, Gloria, if you smoke so many cigarettes you'll lose your pretty complexion!' and 'Oh, Gloria, why don't you marry and settle down?'"
Anthony agreed emphatically while he wondered who had had the temerity to speak thus to such a personage.
"And then," she continued, "there are all the subtle reformers who tell you the wild stories they've heard about you and how they've been sticking up for you."
He saw, at length, that her eyes were gray, very level and cool, and when they rested on him he understood what Maury had meant by saying she was very young and very old. She talked always about herself as a very charming child might talk, and her comments on her tastes and distastes were unaffected and spontaneous.
"I must confess," said Anthony gravely, "that even _I_'ve heard one thing about you."
Alert at once, she sat up straight. Those eyes, with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.
"Tell me. I'll believe it. I always believe anything any one tells me about myself--don't you?"
"Invariably!" agreed the two men in unison.
"Well, tell me."
"I'm not sure that I ought to," teased Anthony, smiling unwillingly. She was so obviously interested, in a state of almost laughable self-absorption.