Horta and the Marqués rose.
Ever since the Bison Ball where, ignored even by her fiancee Freddie whose eyes, like the other men's, leered at Lucy Claudel showing off her legs, that blue tarlataned figure never had ceased to whirl in back of Opal's head as someone to beat. Memory of the anticipation with which she had gone to the Ball in her white crepe de Chine high school graduation dress as Freddie's soon-to-be bride and seeing that floozie's effect on the men had returned again and again to haunt her. It was only recently, after marrying Nicholas, that she could look back with equanimity to the time when she told Freddie, after Oscar the elderly Kansas sausage manufacturer had asked Pa for her, that she had no intention of being stuck in a cottage. But instead of gay social life in Kansas City, Oscar expected her to breed little Oscars in his Tudor-style mansion. Luckily he couldn't do anything about that and had had to consent to an annulment so she could many Milton, who had come to sell the cattle from his ranch when he struck oil. Oklahoma City was more fun and Milton was hardly ever home to bother her. Milton wasn't interested in culture or anything but wildcatting. When Nicholas came to plan the new house she realized she never could be happy except in New York, and that Milton would never leave his rough rancher and oil friends. She liked Nicholas because he seemed too refined to think of nothing but lovemaking, like Oscar and Milton. With him she could forget Freddie. She was still dazed by her good fortune in catching Nicholas and applied herself diligently to forgetting the past and learning how to be Mrs. Nicholas Allwood 3rd. Oscar and Milton had been very nice about financial settlements. Nicholas appreciated them too. At last she was ahead of that little tart, Lucy Claudel who, she saw in a Mode photograph, was up to her old tricks of trying to sneak in. But now, face to face, it was awful. Lucy could still make her feel dowdy.
"I didn't know you knew that charming girl," Horta Cornwallis said to Opal.
Opal lifted her delicately plucked eyebrows and drooped her thin lips in the wistful manner Alveg Dahl was painting her in a Lucy-blue tulle frock holding an open book of French poetry.
"I don't really, she was a tart who ran after my brother when I was a child in Denver."
Horta Cornwallis' hawk head on her plucked old hen neck gave a convulsive jerk. Careful questioning had disclosed that Opal had no knowledge that Horta Cornwallis ever had even been in Denver.
