A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Jicky groped to straighten her glasses. Then she remembered that they were gone.

He was sitting in the half light of several lamps, slowly turning the leaves of a book without attempting to look at it. He laid the book aside and stood up, his shoulders orange in the evening light.

“My daughter, Jocelyn,” said Georgia.

“But how charming,” said the count.

When Georgia came in that night, there was a droop to her; she was crestfallen as Jicky had never seen her crestfallen before.

Jicky patted her on the shoulder.

“Did he dance terribly, shake like a leaf and all that? Did he spill things when he ate? Something went wrong, I can feel it. Won’t you tell me, dearest?”

“Oh, no,” Georgia answered simply. “He carries himself like a twenty-year-old with the antics left out. It’s myself. I never realized it until tonight. It’s — it’s over eight months since we’ve seen each other, you know.”

“You mean he found a change in you?”

“‘How fresh and youthful all your American women are,’ he said, and then he looked at me. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe New York agrees with you. You were not so pale last year in Paris. You have a harried look—”

“Oh, well,” said Jicky bitterly, “if he insists on throwing a roomful of debutantes in your teeth, let it go at that. I think the average person seeing you out together would take him to be your father.”

“No,” said Georgia pensively, “you’re very good to me, but something’s got to be done. It’s for my own satisfaction, you understand. There is this new treatment everyone is beginning to talk about,” she said. “I wonder — Sondra Clark was telling me about it only yesterday. Some kind of heliotrope rays — I don’t know what they’re called — that vitalize the muscles of the face. It’s really an electric bath.”

“Things like that can be dangerous,” said Jicky. “Please don’t.”

“How absurd,” said Georgia. “This is 1928. Things are perfected beyond the point where any risk enters into them. Didn’t that dancer do it when she wanted to acquire a tropical sunburn?”

A week later she was beginning the experiment. Brimful of enthusiasm, she could talk of nothing else. “But I do look better, don’t I?” she would ask Jicky half a dozen times in the course of a day. Jicky was undecided whether it was the process itself or her enormous faith in it that gave her an undeniably quickened reaction these days. The treatments were rather early. As a rule Georgia was gone before anyone was up.

One morning the count put in an appearance just as Jicky had finished breakfast. She recoiled in synthetic modesty, but he seemed not to see her. Obviously pale and shaken, he went directly to the wall cabinet and poured himself a small glass of cordial with a wrist that trembled so exaggeratedly it almost suggested a stage effect.

“Vite. Get yourself dressed,” he said hoarsely.

“What’s happened?” she said. “Where’s Mother?”

“I beg of you get yourself dressed,” he said. “The vibrator have been accident.”

She had no sooner left the room than she was back with a coat thrown over her, tears beginning to form in her eyes. They hurried out together, leaving the door open behind them.

Georgia was already under ether in one of the emergency wards. She lay coifed in gauze like a nun. The count led Jicky from the room after a while, and all afternoon long she paced back and forth in the little waiting room outside. Toward four o’clock they held a consultation over her and announced there was no immediate danger. Skin grafting would be undertaken, they gave Jicky to understand.

“There will be marks, unavoidably, but we will do everything in our power.”

The count shook his head morosely as they seated themselves in the car and started back.

“The marriage will have to be postpone.”

“Marriage?” echoed Jicky.

“She no have told you of our engagement, then? Mon dieu, since last year in Paris already.”

“I’ve seen the ring, I think,” said Jicky.

“Ah, yes, the ring,” he agreed indifferently.

At her door he handed her out of the car with elaborate politeness. Something told Jicky, as she watched him resume his seat and carefully button one chamois glove, that that was the last they would see of him.

Six weeks later, in her own home, the shades drawn and the light carefully tempered, the bandages were finally removed from Georgia’s face and throat. Jicky had taken refuge in the hallway outside that significantly closed door, her chilled wrists in Scotty’s keeping. There was an air of fatality about the apartment. A sickening stillness that gave pause to some ominous thing about to happen. In the other room the light footstep of a nurse was heard, the doctor’s voice in a guarded murmur, and then a silence, utter and obliterating, that lasted hours, it seemed.

A scream, short and swift as a knife thrust, rang out behind Georgia’s door. It held an element of surprise, of a sharp indignity thrust upon one. It could have been the death cry of a woman’s vanity.

Jicky was in Scotty’s arms now, trembling, her face buried on his shoulder.