Later in June horror leered out at Gloria, struck at her and frightened
her bright soul back half a generation. Then slowly it faded out, faded
back into that impenetrable darkness whence it had come--taking
relentlessly its modicum of youth.
With an infallible sense of the dramatic it chose a little railroad
station in a wretched village near Portchester. The station platform lay
all day bare as a prairie, exposed to the dusty yellow sun and to the
glance of that most obnoxious type of countryman who lives near a
metropolis and has attained its cheap smartness without its urbanity. A
dozen of these yokels, red-eyed, cheerless as scarecrows, saw the
incident. Dimly it passed across their confused and uncomprehending
minds, taken at its broadest for a coarse joke, at its subtlest for a
"shame." Meanwhile there upon the platform a measure of brightness faded
from the world.
With Eric Merriam, Anthony had been sitting over a decanter of Scotch
all the hot summer afternoon, while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam
and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped
parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand,
tanning her inevitable legs.
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