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Show BEAUTY'S DAUGHTER By Kathleen Norris C KntMeen Norila WNU Service. mEats3eiar !WWMfOT, CHAPTER XV-Continued 17 Vicky's eyes found the little round violet puncture of the bullet hole at the (lawless marble temple. Serena Se-rena sleeping face was placid, but the once scarlet mouth was pale and decked with blood, and the beautiful pale gold hair was loosened loos-ened into a careless cascade that hung in a web over the side of the bed. There was a horrible sprawling sprawl-ing relaxation In her position, a dreadful mysterious shutness in the colorless lips that made Vicky tremble. trem-ble. "Is there anything to do, Quent?" "Not now." He did not turn from his contemplation of the wreck of what had been so soft, so lovely and alluring and fragrant and warm only a few hours ago.'' "No, It was instantaneous, Vic," he muttered. mut-tered. "Killed herself I" "She thought he was dead, d'you see?" the older man supplied suddenly. sud-denly. "The Chinese woman had come out of his room. It was while we were all in the hall there, awhile back, when we all thought that poor Morrison had no chance." "I thought, from the way you all talked," Quentin said, "that he was! I was amazed when Amah said he wanted to see me. And certainly cer-tainly she must have thought so. Poor woman!" An hour later Victoria and Quentin Quen-tin walked across the Morrisons' side garden, and through the gate into the lane and through their own gate. A perfect spring dawn was strengthening over the world now; it was four o'clock; the east was lushed with exquisite delicate pink, against which shoals and galleons of delicate silver and gray and paler gray cloud made long bars. "I feel reborn," Vicky said. "Reborn. I'm terribly grateful, Vic," Quentin said. "Oh, grateful! If you knew what I was thinking of all night long. Every horror that anyone can imagine imag-ine seemed to be sweeping over me. I had you In jail; I had us all moving to some remote place." "Perhaps you think I didn't, Vic, while we were working over him. Perhaps you think I didn't have a chance to think how I'd taken my life and destroyed it with my two hands. But thank God it's all over now!" "I am tired. Quentin, doesn't the tea for the Vienna doctors and our lunch at the St. Francis seem longer ago than yesterday!" "That wasn't yesterday!" he exclaimed. ex-claimed. "That's all it was." "My God," he said again, struck. "She did do It, didn't she, Quent?" "Yes," he said with a serious look. "I guess she did." "Her killing herself" The words sounded so strange that Vicky had to stop short and think of them "her killing herself looked as if she did," she mined. "She had that I don't know what io call it ruthless quality," Quentin Quen-tin said. "She went over any ob stacle that was in her way. "He roused the very worst in her; he always did," Victoria mused. "He seemed to sit back and laugh at her, and he never let her have enough money even to get away. She told me she came to see me every few days, you know that she had to charge even her lunches at hotels. That day she seemed to me desperate. She looked so beautiful, beauti-ful, too; she was in a sort of corn I color, and her eyes looked so blue. Mother said after she left, A11 dressed up and nowhere to go!' I suppose it was death-in-life to her to live in that quiet country house." Quentin nodded, listening. "You've been a trump all night long. Vic." he said, after a while. "If you'd been like most women, and refused to go over there, we might be in bad trouble this morning. morn-ing. If you were like most women, you'd have kicked me out years ago I don't know why you act the way you do, but I want you to know this sounds damn flat-but I want you to know that I admire you and that I'm grateful! I owe everything I've got in the world to you. I'm just beginning to realize that it's an awful lot. You know I'm not good at speeches, but when I think about you-and this is what I wanted to tell you-I get all choked up. I'm-I'm grate.ul. "Thank you, Quentin!" Vic said from the other end of the table "We'll go on here, and some day I'll have a chance to show you teat I'm changed," Quentin said Its taken me a long time to wake up. rve been a fool. I did the rot tenest thing to you a man can do to his wife! ifsyjustmy luck, it's my incredible in-credible luck that you ve-welW won't say forgiven me; you don forget those things, and you cans forgive them but tw worked it out your way "ldt y0U VC nrlT 7 did ome"nK of which you are ashamed," she said simply didn't. Why should there be any question of forgiveness? If I did something - something wrong, to morrow you'd be sorry-you'd think a little the less of me but you wouldn't be personally touched because I forged a check-your own honor would be Just what it was! My life isn't yours. I'm me. "I wish to the Lord you would do something dumb." Quentin said With Ineloquent force, after a pause. I sound smug." Vicky said, "but I m not And I do dumb things every day. Thousands of them. There were months-there were actual years when your home life was nothing but nustakes. nerves, uproar, my crying and being tired and sick, the children going Into mumps and whooping cough, bills piling up." "But. good heavens, Vic, what's that!" the man said roughly, In Impatience. Im-patience. "What's all that compared to the other thing, compared to hurting your pride, and killing your love for me, and putting the thought of another woman eternally between us? Why, lots of the fellows go home to women who are extravagant extrav-agant and nagging and nervous, and who don't have a houseful of gorgeous kids to show for it! There's no comparison between the two." "I think there is. I think nagging and extravagance and nerves are serious things, too, and I think women wom-en who won't have children, who hate home, who are always running " about with other men, are just as bad! Even if they don't go to the limit even if they fool along, getting get-ting everything they can out of a tfmim "Killed Herself!" man and then stopping short, never giving anything it seems to me detestable," de-testable," Vic said. "My own temptations temp-tations are different," she added. "I think maybe I'm a mother first and a wife afterward; I've never gone in for pink baby pillows and long-legged dolls!" The words brought back with a moment of horror the memory of her last sight of Serena's bedroom, and she was still. "Serena loved you," she said thoughtfully, in the silence. "She never loved anyone but herself," her-self," Quentin said. "Everything she said and did revolved about that. She loved her own' beauty and power. She used them to get what she wanted. I knew it, after a while. Morrison must have discovered dis-covered it as soon as they were married. Her first husband tried twice to kill himself. She was cold and vain, poor girl! And she was the woman," he ended, "for whom I broke your heart!" 1 "No, you didn't break my heart." "Breaking a person's heart is a cheap way of putting it," Quentin said. "It sounds romantic, when it wasn't anything but damn stupid and selfish. You said what it really did, a minute ago. It made you think less of me; that's the real price. We never can go back of that. You'll never be able to trust me again. There'll always be that feeling, somewhere, 'way back in your mind, that I failed you!" Vicky, her elbows on the kitchen table, her chin In her hands, looked thoughtful. "I suppose so," she said slowly. "But I don't know that it matters. You've seen me looking pretty horrible, hor-rible, ugly and crying and frightened fright-ened and only anxious to be let off pain; it doesn't seem to make you like me any less when I'm all gotten up In my new Paris clothes. Luckily Luck-ily people forget those things, when under it all they love each other." Quentin answered her with a long look. "I think you really believe that," he said after a while. "You're not like anyone else In the world!" Vicky in her turn was thoughtful. "Perhaps we're both tired," she said. "For that matter, what's happened hap-pened tonight is enough to throw us into nervous breakdowns. We don't often talk this way. But it's only fair to tell you something, Quentin, that may partly explain the way I feel, the way I act. When we were married, eleven years ago, I talked about marrying for reasons, about not being carried away by excitement, about not falling in love. "I told you my Idea of marriage was companionship, home, children. You were a widower with a delicate deli-cate youngster" She laughed. "It seems funny now to think of Gwen as delicate, doesn't it?" she said. "Women were making your life a burden, and you needed just what I had to give. I remember our talking talk-ing of it once, and your saying that whatever the agreement was before marriage, however reasonable and dispassionate the feeling was, no man could have a young wife around and not come to love her, that is presuming that he didn't come to hate her. Do you remember that?" "Vaguely." "Well, the joke was on me," Vicky said, "for I had it had it desperately, desperate-ly, the whole time! I trembled and got 'silly when you spoke to me, I thought of you all day long and lay awake dreaming of you all night. I was the love-sickest woman who ever knelt down and thanked God that the most marvelous man in the world had deigned to look at her! I never told you, I was too proud. I tackled the big house and the servants serv-ants and Gwen; I even went to the hospital and had your babies, Quent. But I never dared tell you! You never asked me to; you took me calmly for granted, meals and furnace fur-nace and Gwen and babies and answering an-swering the telephone and buying you new shirts, and that was the way I wanted it to be. I didn't want to be the one to introduce the silly, the sentimental side of it, cry when you forgot my birthday, and expect you to compliment me every night on the way my hair was done! I'd said I wanted a certain kind of marriage work and responsibility and companionship, and plenty of criticism if I didn't do my job, and I got it! But I've loved you all the time! Quent, when you come home tired at night and go to sleep with your big heavy head on my shoulder, I lie awake sometimes for joy. Juliet has nothing on me, nor Beatrice, nor Nicolette!" She stood up, smiled at him. "There!" she said. "That's my awful confession. I've made you a speech." Quent took Victoria in his arms. "You've made me a speech. Vic. I'll never forget it." THE END |