asked her to dance, nobody noticed her, nobody looked as if they ever would notice her. She was nineteen years old and nothing like this had ever happened to her before. At home—she and her ancestors before her came from a prosperous country suburb of Boston—she was almost too popular for her own happiness; she lived so much in a group that she hardly had time enough to think life over—to savor her own enjoyment. Of the Harvard men who thronged her parents' house there were always one or two who wanted to marry her, three or four who merely loved her hopelessly, and a great many—and these gave Deborah the most pleasure—who offered her a frank, warm, equal comradeship. She lived surrounded by these different types of masculine admiration.
She was an excellent companion; she was fond of horses and dogs, she rode and drove and motored; she played a good game of tennis and a fair game of golf; she was distinctly an out-of-doors girl, and yet she was so finely made that in evening dress she looked as slim and fragile as any fainting heroine of the early nineteenth century. Only in her movements there was a vigor and firmness that meant strength; her slender ankle never shook, her wrist never trembled. She was very pretty, blond, but not of the pale silver type; nor yet of the purely golden; her hair was the color of old maple furniture; her color was high; her profile short and clear; her jaw a little too square. American men of all ages, even the boys whose friends she had refused, were apt to say when her name was mentioned, “They don't come any better than Deb Goreham.”
So much for New England, but this was the Lido—that irresponsible little stretch of sand between Venice and the Adriatic. Here, where hardly a hundred years ago Byron and Shelley rode their horses along the empty beach, hotels are crowded together.
The Lido is the summer playground of half Italy; and in September it has a special season. Then it draws fashionable English people who do not care for shooting, and Americans who find the month dull in London and Paris, and yet are by no means ready to go home.
Deborah had been in France most of the summer with her parents, but as they were starting for Venice, which was to be the climax of their trip, they had been summoned to Scotland by the illness of an old friend. They were grateful to their cousin, Bradley Goreham, who suggested that Deborah should join his wife and himself, already established at the Lido.
All the Gorehams had the greatest confidence in Bradley—a thin, haggard, prematurely aged New Englander of forty, a noble soul with a poor digestion; he managed the business affairs of the entire clan. He had married a Southerner—not, his relations murmured among themselves, of the best Southern blood. She was admitted into the Goreham family as a sort of nonresident member; she was seldom in Boston, preferring New York and Paris; her desire to know people of importance and to make herself felt in new groups was thought vulgar and snobbish by her family-in-law, whose own opinion was that to have married a Goreham was enough. Deborah knew that Flora would be friends with every one in Venice with a title, and though she disapproved of the methods by which Flora attained these acquaintances, it must be owned she was looking forward to meeting Flora's friends.
Her cousin Bradley was at the station to meet her. She stepped from the dust and dirt of the Paris express out upon the majesty of the Grand Canal. It was the late afternoon, and though her cousin had brought a motor boat to meet her, the distance to the Lido was so great that Flora was already dressing for dinner when they arrived at the hotel. Deborah went into her bedroom to greet her, but Flora was so busy telling her maid how to hook her dress, and urging Bradley to be quick about dressing, and to be sure the motor boat waited to take them back to Venice, where they were dining with a Russian princess, that the interview was not continuous. In the hard light over the dressing table Flora looked harder and older. As she talked she kept passing a powder puff under her chin, where a little hollow was visible. Her handsome, glossy, blue-black eyes kept flitting from her looking-glass to her dress, and back again—never to Deborah.