"Yes. He said that her cloak should have matched them."
Anthony flushed. He has a rather captious code for outsiders. Evidently
Olaf had transgressed it.
"Is the man a dressmaker?"
"Of course not, Anthony."
"Then why should he talk of Nancy's clothes?"
"Well," Nancy remarked, "perhaps the less said about my clothes the
better. I was in my bathing suit."
Anthony was irritable. "Well, why not? You had a right to wear what you
pleased, but he did not have a right to make remarks about it."
I came to Olaf's defense. "You would understand better if you could see
him. He is rather different, Anthony."
"I don't like different people," and in that sentence was a summary of
Anthony's prejudices. He and Nancy mingled with their own kind.
Anthony's friends were the men who had gone to the right schools, who
lived in the right streets, belonged to the right clubs, and knew the
right people. Within those limits, humanity might do as it pleased;
without them, it was negligible, and not to be considered.
After supper the five of them were to go for a sail. There was a moon,
and all the wonder of it.
Anthony was not keen about the plan. "Oh, look here, Nancy," he
complained, "we have done enough for one day--"
"I haven't."
Of course that settled it. Anthony shrugged his shoulders and submitted.
He did not share Nancy's almost idolatrous worship of the sea. It was
the one fundamental thing about her. She bathed in it, swam in it,
sailed on it, and she was never quite happy away from it.
I heard Anthony later in the hall, protesting. I had gone to the library
for a book, and their voices reached me.
"I thought you and I might have one evening without the others."
"Oh, don't be silly, Anthony."
I think my heart lost a beat. Here was a lover asking his mistress for a
moment--and she laughed at him. It did not fit in with my ideas of young
romance.
Yet late that night I heard the murmur of their voices and looked out
into the white night. They stood together by the sun-dial, and his arm
was about her, her head on his shoulder. And it was not the first time
that a pair of lovers had stood by that dial under the moon.
I went back to bed, but I could not sleep. I lighted my bedside lamp,
and read _Vanity Fair_. I find Thackeray an excellent corrective when I
am emotionally keyed up.
Nancy, too, was awake; I could see her light shining across the hall.
She came in, finally, and sat on the foot of my bed.
"Your viking was singing as we passed his boat--"
"Singing?"
"Yes, hymns, Elizabeth. The others laughed, Anthony and Mimi, but I
didn't laugh. His voice is--wonderful--"
She had on a white-crêpe _peignoir_, and there was no color in her
cheeks. Her skin had the soft whiteness of a rose petal. Her eyes were
like stars. As I lay there and looked at her I wondered if it was
Anthony's kisses or the memory of Olaf's singing which had made her eyes
shine like that.