It was larger and more elaborately fitted than the
Grove limousine; in its deep upholstery, its silk curtains and velvet
carpet and gold mounted vanities, Mina Raff was remarkably child-like,
small; her face, brightening at intervals in the rapidly passing lights
outside, was touched by pathos; she seemed crushed by the size, the
swiftness and complexity, of her automobile, and by the gathering
imperious weight of her fame. She was still, however, appealingly
simple; no matter what she might do it would be invested with the
aspect of innocence which, admirable for her art, never for an instant
deserted her personality.
Lee Randon, who liked her better with each accumulating minute,
wondered why he was completely outside the disturbance of her charm. As
a young man, he concluded, he would have been lost in a passionate
devotion to her. Mina realized to the last possible indefinite grace
the ideal, always a silver abstraction, of youth; the old worn simile
of an April moon, distinguished in her case by the qualification,
wistful, was the most complete description of her he possessed. Young
men--Peyton Morris--were worshippers of the moon, the unattainable; and
when they happily attained a reality they hid it in iridescent fancy.
What now formed Lee's vision had, together with no less a mystery, a
greater warmth and implied reality from him. Cytherea and Mina Raff
shared nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to
the stirring of his desire.
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