Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/73

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

curly golden hair and blue eyes and a profile that resembled somewhat Sherril Schell's photograph of Rupert Brooke, a young man with slender, graceful hands which he was inclined to wave rather excessively in punctuation of his verbal effects, reclined on a divan upholstered with green taffeta, smoking a cigarette in a jade holder of a green so dark and so nearly translucent that it paraphrased emerald.

In one of the heavier and easier chairs sat a lady, with a face which, perhaps, you would not call beautiful, but which would assuredly awaken your interest. The forehead was almost entirely obscured by a wave of chestnut hair, bobbed at the back. The eyes were grey, the nose retroussé. She had a good artificial colour and her rather sensual lips were enamelled a vivid carmine. Her jaw was square but it was the square jaw of character, by no means detracting from her charm. She, too, wore white, a robe of Chinese brocaded crêpe, with a girdle of uncut chalcedony, into which she had inserted a cluster of scarlet geraniums. These flowers bloomed also on her small white French hat, a creation of Evelyne Varon.

Campaspe Lorillard was about thirty, intensely feminine, intensely feline, in the most seductive sense of the word. She was addicted to chainsmoking, that is she lighted one cigarette from the other as fast as it burned too near the end of her amethyst holder. She was regarding Paul Moody