Your manners aren't very
good."
"Yes, they are, too," he asserted, aggrieved; "I have to tell you if
you move to a safety where you don't belong." He shook the dice from
the cup. "Now, see there--that just brings me to your man, and I can
send him home."
"I don't care," Helena informed him; "it's a young sort of game,
anyhow. Now I'm wearing waists and buttoned skirts I'd just as leaves
write a letter to Margaret West with no boys in it at all."
She left the parchesi board, and crossed the room to the piano, where
she stood turning over sheets of music with a successful appearance of
critical interest. Gregory, silently struggling with the injustice of
this, gazed up with a shadowed brow at Lee. "I was going to beat her,"
he said, "I was almost home, and she went away. She just got up like
nothing was happening." Helena put in, "Neither there was." Lee Randon
took her place. "You can beat me instead," he proposed. His interest in
the game, he felt, was as false as Helena's pretended musical
preoccupation; but he rolled the dice and shifted the counters, under
Gregory's undeviating scrutiny, with the conviction that parchesi was
not conspicuously different from the other more resounding movements of
the world and its affairs. Gregory easily vanquished him, and Lee rose
with a curt, unwarranted nod of dismissal.
* * * * *
Freezing cocktails in the pewter pitcher, in the repetition of minor
duties which, Lee Randon thought, now constituted four-fifths of his
life, he told himself that Claire Morris had never looked better: she
was wearing a dress of a soft negative blue material, high about her
throat, with glimpses of bright embroidery that brought out her darkly
vivid personality.
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