Phantom lady Read Free

cultured, he could tell that about her. Only someone cultured could have gotten away with what she was doing tonight and not made a ghastly mess of it, either in one direction or the other. She had balance, to take the place of either propriety or recklessness. And there again, if she had leaned a little more one way or the other, she would have been more memorable,

    more positive. If she had been a little less well-bred, she would have had the piquancy, the raffishness, of the parvenu. If she had been a little more, she would have been brilliant—and therefore memorable in that respect. As it was. polarized between the two, she was little better than two dimensional.
    Toward the end, he caught her studying his necktie. He looked down at it questioningly. "Wrong color?" he suggested. It was a solid, without any pattern.
    "No, quite good, in itself," she hastened to assure him. "Only, it doesn't match—it's the one thing that doesn't go with everything else you— Sorry, I didn't mean to criticize." she concluded.
    He glanced down at it a second time, with a sort of detached curiosity, as though he hadn't known until now, himself, just which one it was he had put on. Almost as though he were surprised to find it on him. He destroyed a little of the tonal clash she had indicated by thrusting the edge of his dress handkerchief down out of sight into his pocket.
    He lit their cigarettes, they stayed with their cognacs awhile, and then they left.
    It was only in the foyer—at a full-length glass out in the foyer—that she finally put her hat on again. And at once she came alive, she was something, somebody, again. It was wonderful, he reflected, what that hat could do to her. It was like turning on the current in a glass chandelier.
    A gigantic theater doorman, fully six-four, opened the cab door for them when it had driven up, and his eyes boggled comically as the hat swept past, almost directly under them. He had white walrus-tusk mustaches, almost looked like a line drawing of a theater-doorman in the New Yorker. His bulging eyes followed it from right to left as its wearer stepped down and brushed past him. Henderson noted this comic bit of optic byplay, to forget it again a moment later. If anything is ever really forgotten.
    The completely deserted theater lobby was the best possible

    criterion of how late they actually were. Even the ticket taker at the door had deserted his post by now. An anonymous silhouette against the stage glow, presumably an usher, accosted them just inside the door, sighted their tickets by flashlight, then led them down the aisle, trailing an oval of light backhand along the floor to guide their advancing feet.
    Their seats were in the first row. Almost too close. The stage was an orange blur for a moment or two, until their eyes had grown used to the foreshortened perspective.
    They sat patiently watching the montage of the revue, scene blending into scene with the superimposed effect of motion picture dissolves. She would beam occasionally, even laugh outright now and then. The most he would do was give a strained smile, as though under obligation to do it. The noise, color, and brilliance of lighting reached a crescendo, and then the curtains rippled together, ending the first half.
    The house lights came on, and there was a stir all around them as people got up and went outside.
    "Care for a smoke?" he asked her.
    "Let's stay where we are. We haven't been sitting as long as the rest of them." She drew the collar of her coat closer around the back of her neck. The theater was stifling already, so the purpose of it, he conjectured, was to screen her profile from observation as far as possible.
    "Come across some name you've recognized?" she murmured presently, with a smile.
    He looked down and found his fingers had been busily turning down the upper right-hand corner of each leaf of his program, one by one, from front to back. They were all blunted now, with neat little turned-back triangles