Flirt

Booth Tarkington

Description

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Booth Tarkington has an amazingly deft touch with characterization, and the tense relationship between town flirt Cora Madison and her quieter sister Laura is so compelling that the story has been the basis for a number of filmed versions. As with Tarkington's later novel The Magnificent Ambersons, The Flirt is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of a dysfunctional but ultimately loving family.

Sujets

• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781775453307
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE FLIRT
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BOOTH TARKINGTON
 
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The Flirt First published in 1913 ISBN 978-1-775453-30-7 © 2011 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five
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To SUSANAH
Chapter One
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Valentine Corliss walked up Corliss Street the hottest afternoonof that hot August, a year ago, wearing a suit of white sergewhich attracted a little attention from those observers who wereable to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shapeddelicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women'sclothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of thetall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an artistplying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would haveencountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende thisvery day. Corliss Street is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, thePark Lane, the Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smokyilluminant of our great central levels, but although it esteemsitself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is stillprovincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languortook some note of the alien garment.
Mr. Corliss, treading for the first time in seventeen years thepavements of this namesake of his grandfather, mildly repaid itsinterest in himself. The street, once the most peaceful in theworld, he thought, had changed. It was still long and straight,still shaded by trees so noble that they were betrothed, here andthere, high over the wide white roadway, the shimmering tunnelsthus contrived shot with gold and blue; but its pristine completerestfulness was departed: gasoline had arrived, and a pedestrian,even this August day of heat, must glance two ways beforecrossing.
Architectural transformations, as vital, staggered the returnednative. In his boyhood that posthumously libelled sovereign lady,Anne, had terribly prevailed among the dwellings on this highway;now, however, there was little left of the jig-saw's hare-brainedministrations; but the growing pains of the adolescent city hadwrought some madness here. There had been a revolution which was ariot; and, plainly incited by a new outbreak of the colonies, theGoth, the Tudor, and the Tuscan had harried the upper reaches to aturmoil attaining its climax in a howl or two from the SpanishMoor.
Yet it was a pleasant street in spite of its improvements; inspite, too, of a long, gray smoke-plume crossing the summer skyand dropping an occasional atomy of coal upon Mr. Corliss's whitecoat. The green continuous masses of tree-foliage, lawn, andshrubbery were splendidly asserted; there was a faint wholesomeodour from the fine block pavement of the roadway, white, savewhere the snailish water-wagon laid its long strips of steamingbrown. Locusts, serenaders of the heat, invisible among thebranches, rasped their interminable cadences, competing bitterlywith the monotonous chattering of lawn-mowers propelled byglistening black men over the level swards beneath. And thoughporch and terrace were left to vacant wicker chairs andswinging-seats, and to flowers and plants in jars and green boxes,and the people sat unseen—and, it might be guessed, unclad forexhibition, in the dimmer recesses of their houses—nevertheless,a summery girl under an alluring parasol now and then prettilytrod the sidewalks, and did not altogether suppress an ampleconsciousness of the white pedestrian's stalwart grace; nor washis quick glance too distressingly modest to be aware of thesefaint but attractive perturbations.
A few of the oldest houses remained as he remembered them, andthere were two or three relics of mansard and cupola days; but theherd of cast-iron deer that once guarded these lawns, standingsentinel to all true gentry: Whither were they fled? In hisboyhood, one specimen betokened a family of position andaffluence; two, one on each side of the front walk, spoke of anoble opulence; two and a fountain were overwhelming. He wonderedin what obscure thickets that once proud herd now grazed; and thenhe smiled, as through a leafy opening of shrubbery he caught aglimpse of a last survivor, still loyally alert, the haughty headthrown back in everlasting challenge and one foreleg lifted,standing in a vast and shadowy backyard with a clotheslinefastened to its antlers.
Mr. Corliss remembered that backyard very well: it was an oldbattlefield whereon he had conquered; and he wondered if "theLindley boys" still lived there, and if Richard Lindley would hatehim now as implacably as then.
A hundred yards farther on, he paused before a house more familiarto him than any other, and gave it a moment's whimsical attention,without emotion.
It was a shabby old brick structure, and it stood among thegayest, the most flamboyant dwellings of all Corliss Street like abewildered tramp surrounded by carnival maskers. It held placefull in the course of the fury for demolition and rebuilding, butremained unaltered—even unrepaired, one might have thought—sincethe early seventies, when it was built. There was a saggingcornice, and the nauseous brown which the walls had years ago beenpainted was sooted to a repellent dinge, so cracked and peeledthat the haggard red bricks were exposed, like a beggar throughthe holes in his coat. It was one of those houses which are largewithout being commodious; its very tall, very narrow windows, withtheir attenuated, rusty inside shutters, boasting to the passerbyof high ceilings but betraying the miserly floor spaces. At eachside of the front door was a high and cramped bay-window, one ofthem insanely culminating in a little six-sided tower of slate,and both of them girdled above the basement windows by a narrowporch, which ran across the front of the house and gave access tothe shallow vestibule. However, a pleasant circumstance modifiedthe gloom of this edifice and assured it a remnant of reserve anddignity in its ill-considered old age: it stood back a finehundred feet from the highway, and was shielded in part by afriendly group of maple trees and one glorious elm, hoary, robust,and majestic, a veteran of the days when this was forest ground.
Mr. Corliss concluded his momentary pause by walking up the brokencement path, which was hard beset by plantain-weed and the longgrass of the ill-kept lawn. Ascending the steps, he was assailedby an odour as of vehement bananas, a diffusion from some painfullittle chairs standing in the long, high, dim, rather sorrowfulhall disclosed beyond the open double doors. They were stifflittle chairs of an inconsequent, mongrel pattern; armless, withperforated wooden seats; legs tortured by the lathe to a semblanceof buttons strung on a rod; and they had that day received astreaky coat of a gilding preparation which exhaled the olfactoryvehemence mentioned. Their present station was temporary, theirpurpose, as obviously, to dry; and they were doing some incidentalgilding on their own account, leaving blots and splashes andsporadic little round footprints on the hardwood floor.
The old-fashioned brass bell-handle upon the caller's rightdrooped from its socket in a dead fag, but after comprehensivemanipulation on the part of the young man, and equal complainton its own, it was constrained to permit a dim tinkle remotely.Somewhere in the interior a woman's voice, not young, sang arepeated fragment of "Lead, Kindly Light," to the accompanimentof a flapping dust-cloth, sounds which ceased upon a secondsuccessful encounter with the bell. Ensued a silence, probably tobe interpreted as a period of whispered consultation out of range;a younger voice called softly and urgently, "Laura!" and adark-eyed, dark-haired girl of something over twenty made herappearance to Mr. Corliss.
At sight of her he instantly restored a thin gold card-case to thepocket whence he was in the act of removing it. She looked at himwith only grave, impersonal inquiry; no appreciative invoice ofhim was to be detected in her quiet eyes, which may have surprisedhim, possibly the more because he was aware there was plenty ofappreciation in his own kindling glance. She was very white andblack, this lady. Tall, trim, clear, she looked cool in spite ofthe black winter skirt she wore, an effect helped somewhat,perhaps, by the crisp freshness of her white waist, with itsmasculine collar and slim black tie, and undoubtedly by the evenand lustreless light ivory of her skin, against which the strongblack eyebrows and undulated black hair were lined with attractiveprecision; but, most of all, that coolness was the emanation ofher undisturbed and tranquil eyes. They were not phlegmatic: acontinuing spark glowed far within them, not ardently, butsteadily and inscrutably, like the fixed stars in winter.
Mr. Valentine Corliss, of Paris and Naples, removed hiswhite-ribboned straw hat and bowed as no one had ever bowed inthat doorway. This most vivid salutation—accomplished by addingsomething to a rather quick inclination of the body from the hips,with the back and neck held straight expressed deference withoutaffecting or inviting cordiality. It was an elaborate litt