Fancy Pants Read Online Free PDF Page B

her child was becoming dreadfully spoiled.
Francesca was her baby, her angel, her perfect little girl. She hired
the most liberal tutors, bought the newest dolls, the latest games,
fussed over her, petted her, and let her do everything she wanted as
long as it could not possibly endanger her. Unexpected death had
already reared its ugly head twice in Chloe's life, and the thought of
something happening to her precious child made her blood run cold.
Francesca was her anchor, the only emotional attachment she had been
able to maintain in her aimless life. Sometimes she lay sleepless in
her bed, her skin clammy, as she envisioned the horrors that could
befall a little girl cursed with her father's reckless nature. She saw
Francesca jumping into a swimming pool never to come up again, tumbling
from a ski lift, tearing the muscles in her legs while practicing
ballet, scarring her face in an accident on a bicycle. She couldn't
shake the awful fear that something terrible lurked just beyond her
vision ready to snatch up her daughter, and she wanted to wrap
Francesca in cotton and lock her away in a beautiful silken place where
nothing could ever hurt her.

"No!" she shrieked as Francesca dashed from her side and ran down the
sidewalk after a pigeon. "Come back here! Don't run away like that!"

"But I like to run," Francesca protested. "The wind makes whistles in
my ears."

Chloe knelt down and held out her arms. "Running musses your hair and
makes your face all red. People won't love you if you're not pretty."
She clasped Francesca tightly in her
arms while she uttered this most terrible threat, using it the way
other mothers might offer up the horrors of the boogey man.

Sometimes Francesca rebelled, practicing cartwheels in secret or
swinging from a tree limb when her nanny's attention was distracted.
But her activities were always discovered, and her pleasure-loving
mother, who never denied her anything, who never reprimanded her for
even the most outrageous misbehavior, became so distraught that she
frightened Francesca.

"You could have been killed!" she would shriek, pointing to a grass
stain on Francesca's yellow linen frock or a dirty smear on her cheek.
"See how ugly you look! How awful! Nobody loves ugly little girls!" And
then Chloe would begin to cry in such a heartbroken fashion that
Francesca would grow frightened. After several of these disturbing
episodes, she learned her lesson: anything in life was permissible ...
as long as she looked pretty doing it.

The two of them lived an elegant vagabond life on the proceeds of
Chloe's legacy as well as the largess of the stream of men who passed
through her life in much the same way their fathers had once passed
through Nita's. Chloe's outrageous sense of style and spendthrift ways
contributed to her reputation on the international social circuit as an
amusing companion and highly entertaining houseguest, someone who could
always be counted upon to enliven even the most tedious occasion. It
was Chloe who dictated that the last two weeks of February must always
be spent on the crescent-shaped beaches of Rio de Janeiro; Chloe who
enlivened the leaden hours at Deauville, when everyone had grown bored
with polo, by staging elaborate treasure hunts that sent all of them
out racing through the French countryside in small sleek cars searching
for bald-headed priests, uncut emeralds, or a perfectly chilled bottle
of Cheval Blanc '19; Chloe who insisted one Christmas that they abandon
Saint-Moritz for a Moorish villa in the Algarve where they were
entertained by a group of amusingly dissolute rock stars and a
bottomless supply of hashish.

More frequently than not, Chloe brought her daughter with her, along
with a nanny and whatever tutor was currently in charge
of Francesca's slipshod education. These caretakers generally kept
Francesca separated from the adults during the daytime, but at night
Chloe sometimes offered her up to the jaded jet-setters as if the child
were a