PARTISAN REVIEW
face had a weather-beaten lo<?_k, as though it had been exposed to the
glare of many merciless suns; and her eyes blazed out of the sun-tan
powder around them with the bright blue stare of a scout; only her
pretty, tanned legs suggested a life less hardy-they might have been
going to the beach. Like Mr. Sciarappa (for
all
his little graces),
Miss Grabbe seemed to have been parched and baked by exposure,
hardened and chapped by the winds of rebuff and failure. In contrast,
the young lady, with her pallor and her smile, looked faintly unreal,
like a photograph of a girl whose engagement has just been an–
nounced. And the young man felt himself joined to her in this
sheltered and changeless beatitude; at the same time, in the company
of Miss Grabbe as in that of Mr. Sciarappa, he was aware of a
slight discomfort, a sense of fatuity, like the brief, .antagonized em–
barrassment he noticed in himself whenever, in answer to the in–
evitable question, he replied, with a touch of storminess, that he was
traveling in Europe for pleasure.
That he and the young lady were happy became, in this context,
a crime, or, at best, a breach of taste, like the conspicuous idleness of
the rich. They could hardly, he remarked to himself, be expected to
give up their mutual delight because others were not so fortunate;
they had already settled this question with regard to steak and
cotolette.
Yet, catching Miss Grabbe's eye measuring his happiness in the gondo–
la, he felt inclined to withdraw
his
feelings to some more private place,
just as certain sensitive patrons of restaurants preferred nowadays to
feast indoors, secure from the appraisal of the poor. His state, as he well
knew, was of peculiar interest to Miss Grabbe: for twenty years, Polly
Grabbe had made herself famous by corning to Europe, semi-annually,
in pursuit of love. These sorties of hers had the regularity and the di–
rectness of buyers' trips that are signalized by a paid notice in the
Paris
H erald,
announcing to the dressmaking trade that Miss Blank
of Franklin Simon is staying at the Crillon. Under the eye of that
transatlantic experience, the young man felt a little discomfited, as
if he had been modeling a housedress before a cosmopolite audience.
He had no wish to judge Miss Grabbe, yet he felt installed in a
judgment by the dream of perpetual monogamy into which the
young lady had invited him. In an effort to extricate himself, he
inquired of Miss Grabbe very civilly, as one traveler to another, how
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