Lucinda by Antonio Hope — Read

SINCE I was not to play host that evening, I decided to let Arsenio be first on the gaudy scene which he had prepared. He should receive the other guests; he should take undivided responsibility for the decorations. I waited until I heard him come down and speak to Louis, and even until I heard-as I very well could, in my little bedroom adjoining the _salon_-Louis announcing first "Monsieur Froost," and then-no, it was fat old Amedeo who effected the second announcement, arrogating to himself the rights of an old family servant-that of the most excellent and noble Signora Donna Lucinda Valdez. Thereupon I entered, Amedeo favoring me with no laudatory epithets, but leaving me to content myself with Louis' brief "Monsieur Reelinton."

Lucinda was in splendor; she was-as I, at least, had never before seen her-a grown woman in a grown woman's evening finery. Through all her wanderings she must have dragged this gown about, a relic of her pre-war status-for all I knew, part of the _trousseau_ of the prospective Mrs. Waldo Rillington! But it did not look seriously out of fashion. (If I remember right, women dressed on substantially the same lines just before the war as they did in the first months after it.) It was a white gown, simple but artistic, of sumptuous material.