The Reef

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Anna paused in doubt; but on her naming Mrs. Birch the young
man politely invited her to enter, at the same time casting
an impatient glance at the mute spectator in the background.

The latter, raising his eyes, which were round and bulging,
fixed them, not on the young man but on Anna, whom, for a
moment, he scrutinized as searchingly as the interior of his
hat. Under his gaze she had the sense of being minutely
catalogued and valued; and the impression, when he finally
rose and moved toward the door, of having been accepted as a
better guarantee than he had had any reason to hope for. On
the threshold his glance crossed that of the young man in an
exchange of intelligence as full as it was rapid; and this
brief scene left Anna so oddly enlightened that she felt no
surprise when her companion, pushing an arm-chair forward,
sociably asked her if she wouldn't have a cigarette. Her
polite refusal provoked the remark that he would, if she'd
no objection; and while he groped for matches in his loose
pockets, and behind the photographs and letters crowding the
narrow mantel-shelf, she ventured another enquiry for Mrs.
Birch.

"Just a minute," he smiled; "I think the masseur's with
her." He spoke in a smooth denationalized English, which,
like the look in his long-lashed eyes and the promptness of
his charming smile, suggested a long training in all the
arts of expediency. Having finally discovered a match-box
on the floor beside the sofa, he lit his cigarette and
dropped back among the cushions; and on Anna's remarking
that she was sorry to disturb Mrs. Birch he replied that
that was all right, and that she always kept everybody
waiting.

After this, through the haze of his perpetually renewed
cigarettes, they continued to chat for some time of
indifferent topics; but when at last Anna again suggested
the possibility of her seeing Mrs. Birch he rose from his
corner with a slight shrug, and murmuring: "She's perfectly
hopeless," lounged off through an inner door.

Anna was still wondering when and in what conjunction of
circumstances the much-married Laura had acquired a partner
so conspicuous for his personal charms, when the young man
returned to announce: "She says it's all right, if you don't
mind seeing her in bed."

He drew aside to let Anna pass, and she found herself in a
dim untidy scented room, with a pink curtain pinned across
its single window, and a lady with a great deal of fair hair
and uncovered neck smiling at her from a pink bed on which
an immense powder-puff trailed.

"You don't mind, do you? He costs such a frightful lot that
I can't afford to send him off," Mrs. Birch explained,
extending a thickly-ringed hand to Anna, and leaving her in
doubt as to whether the person alluded to were her
masseur or her husband. Before a reply was possible there
was a convulsive stir beneath the pink expanse, and
something that resembled another powder-puff hurled itself
at Anna with a volley of sounds like the popping of
Lilliputian champagne corks. Mrs. Birch, flinging herself
forward, gasped out: "If you'd just give him a
caramel...there, in that box on the dressing-table...it's
the only earthly thing to stop him..." and when Anna had
proffered this sop to her assailant, and he had withdrawn
with it beneath the bedspread, his mistress sank back with a
laugh.

"Isn't he a beauty? The Prince gave him to me down at Nice
the other day--but he's perfectly awful," she confessed,
beaming intimately on her visitor. In the roseate penumbra
of the bed-curtains she presented to Anna's startled gaze an
odd chromo-like resemblance to Sophy Viner, or a suggestion,
rather, of what Sophy Viner might, with the years and in
spite of the powder-puff, become. Larger, blonder, heavier-
featured, she yet had glances and movements that
disturbingly suggested what was freshest and most engaging
in the girl; and as she stretched her bare plump arm across
the bed she seemed to be pulling back the veil from dingy
distances of family history.

"Do sit down, if there's a place to sit on," she cordially
advised; adding, as Anna took the edge of a chair hung with
miscellaneous raiment: "My singing takes so much time that I
don't get a chance to walk the fat off--that's the worst of
being an artist."

Anna murmured an assent. "I hope it hasn't inconvenienced
you to see me; I told Mr. Birch--"

"Mr. WHO?" the recumbent beauty asked; and then: "Oh,
JIMMY!" she faintly laughed, as if more for her own
enlightenment than Anna's.

The latter continued eagerly: "I understand from Mrs. Farlow
that your sister was with you, and I ventured to come up
because I wanted to ask you when I should have a chance of
finding her."

Mrs. McTarvie-Birch threw back her head with a long stare.
"Do you mean to say the idiot at the door didn't tell you?
Sophy went away last night."

"Last night?" Anna echoed. A sudden terror had possessed
her. Could it be that the girl had tricked them all and
gone with Owen? The idea was incredible, yet it took such
hold of her that she could hardly steady her lips to say:
"The porter did tell me, but I thought perhaps he was
mistaken. Mrs. Farlow seemed to think that I should find
her here."

"It was all so sudden that I don't suppose she had time to
let the Farlows know. She didn't get Mrs. Murrett's wire
till yesterday, and she just pitched her things into a trunk
and rushed----"

"Mrs. Murrett?"

"Why, yes. Sophy's gone to India with Mrs. Murrett; they're
to meet at Brindisi," Sophy's sister said with a calm smile.

Anna sat motionless, gazing at the disordered room, the pink
bed, the trivial face among the pillows.

Mrs. McTarvie-Birch pursued: "They had a fearful kick-up
last spring--I daresay you knew about it--but I told Sophy
she'd better lump it, as long as the old woman was willing
to...As an artist, of course, it's perfectly impossible for
me to have her with me..."

"Of course," Anna mechanically assented.

Through the confused pain of her thoughts she was hardly
aware that Mrs. Birch's explanations were still continuing.
"Naturally I didn't altogether approve of her going back to
that beast of a woman. I said all I could...I told her she
was a fool to chuck up such a place as yours. But Sophy's
restless--always was--and she's taken it into her head she'd
rather travel..."

Anna rose from her seat, groping for some formula of leave-
taking. The pushing back of her chair roused the white
dog's smouldering animosity, and he drowned his mistress's
further confidences in another outburst of hysterics.
Through the tumult Anna signed an inaudible farewell, and
Mrs. Birch, having momentarily succeeded in suppressing her
pet under a pillow, called out: "Do come again! I'd love to
sing to you."

Anna murmured a word of thanks and turned to the door. As
she opened it she heard her hostess crying after her:
"Jimmy! Do you hear me? Jimmy BRANCE!" and then, there
being no response from the person summoned: "DO tell him
he must go and call the lift for you!"

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