“if you want to act like a little ragamuffin——”
Diana did want to. The evolutions which she practiced daily on the sidewalk and which were thought by the neighbors to be some new form of hop-scotch were in reality the preliminary work on an Apache slouch. When it was perfected, Diana lurched forth into the streets of Greenwich, her face violently distorted and half-obliterated by her father’s slouch hat, her body reeling from side to side, jerked hither and yon by the shoulders, until to look at her long was to feel a faint dizziness rising to the brain.
At first it was merely absurd, but when Diana’s conversation commenced to glow with weird rococo phrases, which she imagined to be the dialect of the underworld, it became alarming. And a few years later she further complicated the problem by turning into a beauty—a dark little beauty with tragedy eyes and a rich voice stirring in her throat.
Then America entered the war and Diana on her eighteenth birthday sailed with a canteen unit to France.
The past was over; all was forgotten. Just before the armistice was signed, she was cited in orders for coolness under fire. And—this was the part that particularly pleased her mother—it was rumored that she was engaged to be married to Mr. Charley Abbot of Boston and Bar Harbor, “a young aviator of position and charm.”
But Mrs. Dickey was scarcely prepared for the changed Diana who landed in New York. Seated in the limousine bound for Greenwich, she turned to her daughter with astonishment in her eyes.
“Why, everybody’s proud of you, Diana,” she cried. “The house is simply bursting with flowers. Think of all you’ve seen and done, at nineteen!”
Diana’s face, under an incomparable saffron hat, stared out into Fifth Avenue, gay with banners for the returning divisions.
“The war’s over,” she said in a curious voice, as if it had just occurred to her this minute.
“Yes,” agreed her mother cheerfully, “and we won. I knew we would all the time.”
She wondered how to best introduce the subject of Mr. Abbot.
“You’re quieter,” she began tentatively. “You look as if you were more ready to settle down.”
“I want to come out this fall.”
“But I thought——” Mrs. Dickey stopped and coughed—“Rumors had led me to believe——”
“Well, go on, Mother. What did you hear?”
“It came to my ears that you were engaged to that young Charles Abbot.”
Diana did not answer and her mother licked nervously at her veil. The silence in the car became oppressive. Mrs. Dickey had always stood somewhat in awe of Diana—and she began to wonder if she had gone too far.
“The Abbots are such nice people in Boston,” she ventured uneasily. “I’ve met his mother several times—she told me how devoted——”
“Mother!” Diana’s voice, cold as ice, broke in upon her loquacious dream. “I don’t care what you heard or where you heard it, but I’m not engaged to Charley Abbot. And please don’t ever mention the subject to me again.”
In November Diana made her debut in the ballroom of the Ritz. There was a touch of irony in this “introduction to life”—for at nineteen Diana had seen more of reality, of courage and terror and pain, than all the pompous dowagers who peopled the artificial world.
But she was young and the artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the “Beale Street Blues,” while five hundred pairs of gold and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
In the center of this twilight universe Diana moved with the season, keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.
The year melted into summer. The flapper craze startled New York, and skirts went absurdly high and the sad orchestras played new tunes. For a while Diana’s beauty seemed to embody this new fashion as once it had seemed to embody the higher excitement of the war; but it was noticeable that she encouraged no lovers, that for all her popularity her name never became identified with that of any one man. She had had a hundred “chances,” but when she felt that an interest was becoming an infatuation she was at pains to end it once and for all.
A second year dissolved into long dancing nights and swimming trips to the warm South. The flapper movement scattered to the winds and was forgotten; skirts tumbled precipitously to the floor and there were fresh songs from the saxophones for a new crop of girls. Most of those with whom she had come out were married now—some of them had babies. But Diana, in a changing world, danced on to newer tunes.
With a third year it was hard to look at her fresh and lovely face and realize that she had once been in the war. To the young generation it was already a shadowy event that had absorbed their older brothers in the dim past—ages ago. And Diana felt that when its last echoes had finally died away her youth, too, would be over. It was only occasionally now that anyone called her “Diamond Dick.” When it happened, as it did sometimes, a curious, puzzled expression would come into her eyes as though she could never connect the two pieces of her life that were broken sharply asunder.
Then, when five years had passed, a brokerage house failed in Boston and Charley Abbot, the war hero, came back from Paris, wrecked and broken by drink and with scarcely a penny to his name.
Diana saw him first at the Restaurant Mont Mihiel, sitting at a side table with a plump, indiscriminate blonde from the halfworld. She excused herself unceremoniously to her escort and made her way toward him. He looked up as she approached and she felt a sudden faintness, for he was worn to a shadow and his eyes, large and dark like her own, were burning in red rims of fire.
“Why, Charley——”
He got drunkenly to his feet and they shook hands in a dazed way. He murmured an introduction, but the girl at the table evinced her displeasure at the meeting by glaring at Diana with cold blue eyes.
“Why, Charley——” said Diana again, “you’ve come home, haven’t you.”
“I’m here for good.”
“I want to see you, Charley. I—I want to see you as soon as possible. Will you come out to the country tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” He glanced with an apologetic expression at the blonde girl. “I’ve got a date. Don’t know about tomorrow. Maybe later in the week——”
“Break your date.”
His companion had been drumming with her fingers on the cloth and looking restlessly around the room. At this remark she wheeled sharply back to the table.
“Charley,” she ejaculated, with a significant frown.
“Yes, I know,” he said to her cheerfully,
