The Flirt. Booth Tarkington

the iron railing of the porch, and, leaning forward, assumed as exactly as possible the attitude in which she had sat so long beside Valentine Corliss. She leaned very slowly closer and yet closer to the mirror; a rich colour spread over her; her eyes, gazing into themselves, became dreamy, inexpressibly wistful, cloudily sweet; her breath was tumultuous. “`Even as you and I’?” she whispered.

      Then, in the final moment of this after-the-fact rehearsal, as her face almost touched the glass, she forgot how and what she had looked to Corliss; she forgot him; she forgot him utterly: she leaped to her feet and kissed the mirrored lips with a sort of passion.

      “You darling!” she cried. Cora’s christening had been unimaginative, for the name means only, “maiden.” She should have been called Narcissa.

      The rhapsody was over instantly, leaving an emotional vacuum like a silence at the dentist’s. Cora yawned, and resumed the loosening of her hair.

      When she had put on her nightgown, she went from one window to another, closing the shutters against the coming of the morning light to wake her. As she reached the last window, a sudden high wind rushed among the trees outside; a white flare leaped at her face, startling her; there was a boom and rattle as of the brasses, cymbals, and kettle-drums of some fatal orchestra; and almost at once it began to rain.

      And with that, from the distance came a voice, singing; and at the first sound of it, though it was far away and almost indistinguishable, Cora started more violently than at the lightning; she sprang to the mirror lights, put them out; threw herself upon the bed, and huddled there in the darkness.

      The wind passed; the heart of the storm was miles away; this was only its fringe; but the rain pattered sharply upon the thick foliage outside her windows; and the singing voice came slowly up the street.

      It was a strange voice: high-pitched and hoarse—and not quite human, so utter was the animal abandon of it.

      “I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie,” it wailed and piped, coming nearer; and the gay little air—wrought to a grotesque of itself by this wild, high voice in the rain—might have been a banshee’s love-song.