Lost Lake House Read Free Page B

tossed about off-hand greetings with one nod of his
smooth black head, and immediately assumed the position of the
center of attention. He was used to it. Sloop Jackson was a Lost
Lake House fixture, a dapper, “fast” young man whose occupation was
spending inherited money with as little exertion as possible. He
was undoubtedly the best-dressed man there, with tailored evening
clothes and real gold cufflinks and collar studs and his jet-black
hair slicked back with brilliantine. He gave the impression of
being on familiar terms with the management of the House and knew
everyone on the dance floor. Kitty and Ida and all the others were
crazy about him, but Dorothy had not quite made up her mind yet.
The first time he had asked her to dance it was a great sensation,
to know the other girls were eaten up with envy…and he was an
excellent dancer, gliding smoothly across the floor…but there was
something that irked her about those subtly amused black eyes in
the clean-shaven face oddly white for a man so dark-haired. He
seemed to know she edged away from him, and to amuse himself in
getting closer to her.
    Sadie appropriated him quickly. “Sloop, did
you see Em Hooper’s bracelet? Is it true that it’s real?”
    “Personally, I think it’s ridiculous,” said
Ida loftily.
    Sloop Jackson leaned an elbow on the stand
of a potted fern, looking not unlike a figure in a tailor’s
advertisement. “Well, it’s true that she’s wearing a bracelet, at
the very least. Didn’t you see it?”
    The girls chastised his sense of humor in an
indignant clamor. “But are the diamonds real…and who gave it
to her? Charlie said you’d know.”
    “Charlie’s an ape,” said Jackson, smiling as
if he were delivering a compliment, and looked over their heads at
their attached young men. “Any of you coming downstairs later?”
    “I can’t afford it if I’ve got to buy Ida
diamonds,” said one of them, and more hilarity ensued.
    Under cover of it, Sloop Jackson leaned
forward over the sofa a little. “How about the next dance,
Dolly?”
    Dorothy rather liked it when the girls
called her Dolly, but it bothered her when Sloop Jackson said it.
It was at these moments that she rather thought she disliked
him.
    “I think I’m going to have a headache,” she
said, and was annoyed when the others treated it as another
witticism and went off into squeals of laughter.
    “Music’s good for headaches, you know. Just
put your head on my shoulder and try it,” said Jackson, dropping
his voice to that low tone that the other girls would have died to
have directed at them, and which Dorothy never could figure out how
to answer.
    “It isn’t that bad a headache,” she
said, and when Jackson grinned she didn’t know whether it was in
appreciation or whether he was laughing at her again.
    The band began to play again—an impudent
little jazz waltz that Dorothy loved. She began to tap her foot
lightly in time with it, forgetting that the others were there. She
leaned to look past them and watched the musicians among the ferns,
who seemed embowered in their own rhythmic world, swaying their
shoulders slightly or tapping their own feet in time as clarinet
and saxophone winked beneath the lights.
    Sloop Jackson slid around and leaned his arm
on the back of the velvet sofa, stretching over it like a
self-satisfied panther. “I guess your headache has changed its
mind?”
    “Oh, be quiet —how you people can
ignore that music to gossip about diamonds I’ll never know,” said
Dorothy, half laughing but distracted. She was trying to hum
along.
    “Come and dance to it, then. Invitation
open—excursion trains leaving at all hours.” Jackson straightened
himself and swung round the end of the sofa, extending his
hand.
    There was an easy grace about everything he
did that was intoxicating somehow—perhaps it was his air of being
so sure of himself that made you feel he must be right after all.
The mellow champagne-sound of saxophones