In those first years what
he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always
through the pattern of the curtain.
It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for
another summer. Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered,
restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining
other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado,
from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than
Gloria's desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal
variant among the changing colors of the sea. Out of the Pacific there
rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries
built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar
glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and
Newport and Palm Beach. And, as the waves met and splashed and glittered
in the most placid of the bays, so they joined this group and that, and
with them shifted stations, murmuring ever of those strange
unsubstantial gaieties in wait just over the next green and
fruitful valley.
A simple healthy leisure class it was--the best of the men not
unpleasantly undergraduate--they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates
list for some etherealized "Porcellian" or "Skull and Bones" extended
out indefinitely into the world; the women, of more than average beauty,
fragilely athletic, somewhat idiotic as hostesses but charming and
infinitely decorative as guests.
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