"Will Madam leave any message?" Gorham asked.
"Oh," she sighed, "just say I've gone."
"For an indefinite stay, Madam?"
Languidly, Mrs. Van Orton motioned to the chauffeur. "No," she said. "Just say I've gone."
The purring motor drew away. Only Gorham's eyes moved as he watched it turn the corner. With a start he recovered himself and closed his mouth. "Well!" he said as he walked up the stairs. A greater degree of volubility had returned to him when he reported the incident to the cook.
Just for the moment, Gilda Ransome's life had crystallized into one desperate wish: if she couldn't scratch her thigh, this instant, she would go stark, raving mad. A few hours earlier she had thought that if she didn't have breakfast life would be insupportable. Hunger was bad enough—but this itch!
"You may rest now," said Mr. Blake, the well-known designer of the fleshier covers of the naughtier magazines. He turned away and lit a cigarette. Gilda applied her nails to her skin as she went behind a screen and drew on a dressing-gown.
She began to think about her hunger again. She was not hungry because she was on a reducing diet—she needed neither reduction nor addition. Every artist for whom she had posed had agreed that her figure was "just the type"—presumably the type that sells magazines. And her face was certainly no less attractive than her figure—which is an emphatic statement.
She felt starved because influenza had kept her idle for three weeks and during that time her money had run out. She had never been one to save.
Later in the day she fainted while trying to hold a tiring pose. Mr. Blake was very much annoyed, and he determined that in the future he would use stronger, if less perfect, models.
In the West Indies there were many, many men who would have testified to the cleverness of Jeremiah Van Orton. As a lad of twenty he had come to Curaçao from Holland, and for forty-five years thereafter he had remained in the Indies. Then he had decided that he was too rich and too old to go on working. That was his first mistake. If he had kept his nose to the grindstone, he would not have come to New York. He would not have met Marion Martin, the actress. He would not have made a fool of himself.
Van Orton sat huddled in front of an open fire and thought the matter over. In this climactic hour he paused to review his life and works.
Vivid flashes of memory confused his efforts to keep his thoughts orderly. A tongue of flame licked around a log in the fireplace. A thread of scented smoke curled into the room. . . . A night in the Haitian jungle—when was it? Twenty—thirty years ago? A black wench was dying. "For no reason," the doctor said; "for superstition. Voodoo." . . . Marion Martin had been convincing. She had said that she was tired of young men—men whom she could not respect. She had said a man was not in his prime until sixty or seventy. Until then, he was callow, unproved, not worthy of admiration or love. He knew nothing of metropolitan people. He had been attracted to her and, presently, he had believed and loved her. . . . What was that about the natives destroying with such care every fingernail cutting, every hair? One had to be careful—voodoo was strong in the West Indies. . . . He had given Marion his honorable name
