up on a Fifth Avenue bus. He's an advertising man, he sells those ads in theatre programs. His name is Herbert. He dresses very well, like the Prince of Wales, and has beautiful blue eyes."
So that was why Lucy had not been home evenings recently, returning so late. As always, she spoke of herself as the pursuer. "I wondered what you've been up to," Vida said dryly.
"Yes, the only trouble is I'm spending too much time with him, so I think I'll have to let him go or I might get too fond of him. I've only been really in love once in my life. With a man I'd have given up anything for. I made a mistake in thinking that if you're really in love the one you love feels that way too. Maybe a man and woman never feel the same about each other. Your old poets make believe it is possible because they want it to be. Anyway, he didn't notice how I felt. Or maybe he didn't want to. I made up my mind I was being foolish. The thing to do is to have as much fun as you can. It's not much anyway. When you're dead, you're dead, and I don't want to live to grow old, not the way Mother is anyway."
"Stop it!" Vida cried peremptorily, fearful as well for herself. "You're not even old enough yet to vote."
For a dreadful moment Vida had thought she meant Vermillion. But no, she reassured herself, it wasn't possible, not that any man wouldn't be attracted to Lucy, as Vermillion had been when drunk at Clem's party. But his interests were manifestly divergent from Lucy's. They really had nothing in common. No, it must have been someone she met after I went to Congress, and that was why she had let herself run down so and stay at the Jason.
"Herbert's coming back at six tonight from his folks in Ohio for New Year's Eve and I thought if you have a beau we'd have a party here, the four of us," Lucy said after reading the telegram.
"Clem asked me to go out with him and an art dealer from Paris who, he hopes, will give him a show but I said no. I'm going to stay home," Vida said, wondering whether there would ever be anyone like Vermillion with whom to begin a new year.
Vermillion's two Christmas cards stood side by side on the mantelpiece, Lucy's a small print of a Laurencin girl chasing butterflies, and hers the photograph of a kiosk with an advertisement of Molitre's L'Ecole des Femmes at the Theatre Français. Into this choice she tried to read a personal message to herself in which he was saying they had more in common than Lucy snatching at butterflies.
