.. take that nonsense
about the doll, which, in a recalled classical allusion, he had
privately named Cytherea. Peyton Morris would never have entered into
that!
Lee Randon, on one of his infrequent trips to New York, had seen it in
a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue, and instantly it had
captivated his attention, brought him to a halt. The doll, beautifully
dressed in the belled skirt of the eighteen-forties, wore plum-colored
silk with a bodice and wide short sleeves of pale yellow and, crossed
on the breast, a strip of black Spanish lace that fell to the hem of
the skirt. It wasn't, of course, the clothes that attracted him--he
only grew conscious of them perhaps a month later--but the wilful
charm, the enigmatic fascination, of the still face. The eyes were long
and half closed under finely arched brows, there was a minute patch at
the right corner of a pale scarlet, smiling mouth; a pointed chin
marked an elusive oval beneath black hair drawn down upon a long slim
neck, hair to which was pinned an odd headdress of old gilt with, at
the back, pendent ornamental strands of gold-glass beads.
Insistently conventional, selectly ordinary, in appearance, the stick
with a pig-skin handle hanging from his left arm, he had studied the
doll with a deepening interest. Never in life, he told himself, had he
seen a woman with such a magnetic and disturbing charm.
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