Chapter VI

Melissa went home, from her session with the Marchesa, walking on air, as the saying goes. She might have been suspicious of that elderly marplot’s motives; she chose not, she chose with her eyes shut and her hands out to take what the fates were apparently ready to offer. It couldn’t be worse than the stagnation of her present existence. Anything was better than living in a void.

If living on the Marchesa’s inscrutable bounty involved a certain gulping down of Melissa’s pride, a certain stifling of her feeling for independence ... pride and independence have gone into the discard before this when a woman’s hunger for beauty was concerned.

“If _she_ wants to experiment--why shouldn’t _I_?” ... thus Melissa, climbing the steps of her brownstone horror with a wild high song in her heart.

At the thought of deliberate man-hunting, she naturally and with womanly reticence rather paused--on one toe as it were, with the other pointed for flight. But after all--wasn’t that what she had cried for? A place in which to be her actual inner self, her loveliest self, ... so that when the man came along whom her soul desired, he should see her--and know her.

Didn’t one, after all, have always, gently, to focus the masculine attention, when it came to a matter of seeing and knowing?

“Give me a year--” thought shameless Melissa ... she added in unconscious imitation of a certain northern constabulary--“and I’ll get my man!”

The Marchesa, of course, had corrupted her. The Marchesa would have shrieked with wicked laughter, to see Melissa, locked in her room that night, after an uncommonly distasteful dinner (corned beef and cabbage, no less!) ... trying a gray chiffon veil about her slim bare shoulders ... trying her hair, demurely parted, drawn low over her ears, with an artificial camellia set just where a young man’s heart might look--before it leaped.

Strange Melissa! Already in process of transmogrification. Already feeling her eyelids grow heavier, her smile slower, her voice deeper, ... her hands more subtly tensed.

She slept and dreamed of--the office--which hardened her determination to get away from it ... and from everything else that was hers. At noon, the next day, incredibly but punctually, the Marchesa called in a large gray limousine and took Melissa to the bank she commonly designated as her own. There, formalities were engaged in involving the opening of an account in Melissa’s name, the preparation and presentation of a check-book ... other inoffensive red tape.

“Now--” said the Marchesa, once again within her equipage--“you may do yourself nicely on that.”

“Oh, quite!” said Melissa, languid as a water-lily.

At which the Marchesa dissolved into ribald cackles of appreciation. “Even with me--” she gasped--“Even with me ... already! You’re to the manner born, my dear! ... now nothing remains but to set the jewel.”

She drove Melissa home and left her, with a reassuring hint of speedy action.

“To-morrow, perhaps--we’ll look at one or two places my agent has in view. You might see about street things, at once--I’d like you to be well turned out when I take you castle-hunting.”

“I shall be ready,” Melissa assured her.

She was. She was a downright picture in smoky grays, with a wide simple gray hat and slim simple gray shoes--the costliest kind of simplicity--when just before dusk of the third day thereafter, she once more entered that large purring car, sat down at the side of a sweetly leering Marchesa, and was mysteriously snatched through ambient, if soot-laden airs, along the city streets.

“There are one or two places--” explained the Marchesa, “which my agent thought might interest us.” She had given the chauffeur an address on Central Park West. “Let me look at you--turn your head this way!” She might have been speaking to a mannequin. A slow flush spread to the silken dark wave above Melissa’s ears.

The Marchesa continued unmoved. “Not bad--a little more rouge, perhaps.... Gray would take the color from a Venus.... What are you blushing about?”

“I’m not--a Venus,” said Melissa--“and I prefer very little rouge.”

“For moral reasons--or artistic?” inquired the Marchesa with interest.

“Artistic, of course,” said Melissa coolly. “What have morals to do with it?”

“My own point of view exactly,” sighed the Marchesa. She patted Melissa’s arm--then pinched it.... “Just on the right side of thinness!” she concluded with curious satisfaction.

Melissa gently withdrew from that prodding touch. She had a fleeting unpleasant recollection of a man in a butcher’s apron, poking and prodding a denuded fowl....

The place on Central Park West was interestingly indistinguishable from a number of other places, except by two moon-globed lamps standing either side of the entrance. Melissa followed the Marchesa up the steps and over to the desk, in the wide cool lobby, with a slight catch in her breathing, a mad question singing through her head--“_Is it here?... Is it here?_”

She scarcely listened to the Marchesa, suavely demanding a key. They rose in the elevator, past one blackly numbered floor after another ... eight, nine, ten....

“It’s at the top of the world, you see,” said the Marchesa ... “however--there are two others--somewhere across the Park--if we don’t care for this.”

The clerk who went up with them, opened a door, at the end of a long, quiet passage, beyond the dignified and mirror-lightened stillness of a small square entresol.

“It’s a very attractive apartment,” he volunteered politely.

The Marchesa entered it with business-like brusqueness. Melissa, following more slowly, stood in the doorway, a double French doorway closely curtained in dull creamy silk--and felt her hand go, groping to her heart.

It was--so inevitably--in that first moment of seeing, that first vague silent, twilit moment, before even the lights were on, or the windows opened ... Melissa’s room!

She knew it, as she might have known with almost a pang of recognition, after weary years of separation, the face of a friend ... more than that--the face of a lover.

Very quietly, without a word, she followed the Marchesa; stood in the center of the floor and looked about her critically.

“H’m’m!” said the Marchesa--“Not bad! ... good high ceiling ... open fireplace ... what do you think of it, Miss Wayne?”

Good high ceiling! It rose to a gracious and lofty height, a fair half-story above the ordinary room. An open fire-place!... An utter dream of a fireplace, wide and dark and deep with logs, beautiful rough scaly-barked logs, on shining brass andirons ... with a mantel-shelf of dimly-gleaming marble ... with a rug of wonderful faded blues and purples and scarlets ... with a deep delicious couch beyond the rug, cushioned not like a couch in a harem--but adequately! ... with two slim, curving lilac-and-amber-shaded lamps above the couch ... with a long narrow table just behind it....

“Well!” said the Marchesa a trifle impatiently--“what’s wrong?”

Melissa, with a gasp, came back to reality. She had been strewing books upon that table ... though with no visible hands ... setting black-red roses in a crystal bowl beneath the farther lamp ... touching a match to those logs ... watching the golden sparks stream up the chimney....

She said simply--“It’s a dream!” And spoke the truth.

The Marchesa looked pleased. “I’d like a little light!” she told the clerk, imperative as a minor deity.

He pressed a button near the door. Candles bloomed softly around the walls. Their light disclosed rich mellow tapestries, tall chairs with carven backs, a big inviting desk set crosswise in a corner and bearing yet another lamp ... a small round table before a window ... those windows--four of them in a row--almost as high as the room itself! Melissa went toward them like some one enchanted. She heard herself say--“This looks across the Park--doesn’t it?” Then she stood with both hands gripping the cold rough stone of the balustrade outside and stared--wordless.

Here was the place which looked clean across Heaven.

A sweep of sky from north to south, from the east to the wall at one’s back. A sweep of trees in the Park below, gray-green and misty and vague. Stretches of turf laced by ribbony winding roads ... where motors forever swirled in a fluctuant tide.

Around the horizon in a vast irregular fretted arc, the tall towers of Manhattan, pierced by a firefly legion of blinking yellow lights. Over all, the dusk, dropping, grayly ... over a magic city.

Said the Marchesa, appearing suddenly at Melissa’s elbow, the silver flowers on her hat quivering alertly--“I once had an apartment in Paris, looking down on Montmartre ... this reminds me of it.... I was madly in love with an artist--well! There’s a bedroom,--not bad--and a passable bath. Shall we look any farther?”

“Oh, this!” said Melissa--“--_this!_” Her hands actually trembled. The Marchesa with a knowing snicker turned back into the room.

Melissa lingered, watched those far-flung incredible lights, and while she stood there, somewhere, a caressing baritone began--softly, yet with a kind of hardy gayety ... “Somebody loves me.... Who can it be?”

A silly little song--with a recurrent minor that was like a small, slim, shining knife-blade in one’s heart ... a song from some gaudy revue ... hardly a song at all, just a catch-penny tune ... unbearably sweet!

Melissa felt that the man who sang it was probably at the moment tying his tie before a mirror.

Making ready to go out and see--who loved him.

Also, she guessed that he couldn’t be more than a wall or so away.

He would be dark--with a voice like that--smooth, shining dark hair ... cool, laughing dark eyes....

She went back into the wonderful room. The Marchesa was concluding arrangements with the clerk.

“As your nephew said--” the clerk was observing garrulously.

“Yes--yes! Of course--Oh, very well!” cried the Marchesa and waved him brutally into silence. “This will do. No need for any further discussion. Miss Wayne would like to move in to-morrow.” She turned to Melissa--the merest formality.... “You’d like to move in to-morrow, my dear?”

Swift steps went down the hall outside--a lilting whistle. “There’s some one in the next apartment,” explained the clerk. “A gentleman from the Hawaiian Islands--a sugar planter, I believe.”

The whistle rose and fell, impudently clear, while the gentleman from Hawaii waited for the elevator.

“Somebody loves me ... who can it be? ... may-be it’s--you!”

“I wish I could move in to-night!” said Melissa.

The Marchesa broke into cracked and tinkling laughter. She put up two white-gloved fingers and nipped Melissa’s hot cheek.

“Now, now!” said the Marchesa--“where’s Lady Disdain? You’ll need a cool head--if you’re to sit by _that_ fire!”