The Dark Lady Read Online Free PDF Page A

and touched her fingertips to his. "There! Did you feel the shock?"
    "Oh, yes. I'm better already. I think we're going to be friends, Miss Trask."
    Edouardo, it turned out, had a reputation most unusual for an Italian; he was not a ladies' man. The relationship that he and Ivy developed was accepted with a smile and a shrug by the Porters and their friends; nobody gossiped when he took Amy's old-maid niece to a concert or for a drive in Rock Creek Park. Ivy was too shrewd to be falsely modest. She divined at once that her value to Edouardo was more in what she was not than what she was, and she was perfectly willing to have it that way, to play Jane Eyre to his expurgated Rochester. She liked to sit by him in the old victoria that he rented for drives by the river or to walk with him by the cherry trees. His formal, balanced phrases, his velvet tones opened a new world for her. She noted now for the first time all the colors of spring and of sunset, and she learned the stories behind the lacquered diplomacy of the day. She even put together a picture of the Italy of his boyhood, replete to the ravens around the towers of the villa in Fiesole and the smell of incense in the damp darkness of the family chapel. Ivy hugged herself with delight at the realization that she was at last able to put her hard-won knowledge of human beings to good use. How many silly girls would have spoiled it all by trying to marry him!
    One Sunday spring afternoon, as they walked by the bank of the river, in the full, damp, heart-moving air, Edouardo's discourse became more personal.
    "It is not always easy to be Italian, you know. So much is expected of one. There are days when I curse our reputation for romance! My sisters are always ready to cut me to pieces when I so much as look at a lady who is not their candidate for Signora Calabrese."
    "I guess it's lucky there's an ocean between them and me!"
    "But you are sensible, my dear Ivy. I sometimes think you are the most sensible individual in all Washington. Or the only one. So many of your compatriots seem to view life through a kind of screen which converts individuals into types. Your old men become wise, your maidens innocent, your youths lusty, and..."
    "And our Italians lovers!" Ivy interrupted with a sharp laugh to cover her tension. "Yes, my only asset as a child was seeing the world as it was. And my only education was learning not to tell people what I saw."
    "But will you tell
me,
Ivy?"
    "Yes!" she exclaimed with sudden decision, walking on quickly ahead so that she would not have to look at him. "I see that you are afraid that I may be a goose. That I may develop ideas about our friendship. That you may even find my uncle waiting on your doorstep with a shotgun in his hand! You needn't worry.
I'm
the one he'd shoot. But that's not the point, anyway: what he would think or what my aunt would think or what anybody would think. It only matters what
we
think. And here it is, Edouardo. I have no fantasies of becoming your wife. No fantasies about romance. I have no desires, no interests, in that field. All I care about is our friendship. It is important to me that it should continue. Unchanged." She stopped now and faced him, breathing hard. "And I feel I could murder any lumbering fool who interferes with it!"
    Edouardo clasped her hand in both of his. "Dear Ivy," he murmured. "We will always be friends. I know that now."
    Walking home, she trembled at the narrowness of her escape. It was as if she had been crossing a bare heath under the crack of thunder. Big ugly gods, like buddhas, glinted malevolently at her. They knew whom she loved! And was not love a thing to be revealed, to be leered at, to be opened up like a package on their dirty altar before prying eyes and held up, a bloody, aborted fetus to the humiliation of any man who had failed to respond to it, who had denied Venus? Oh, no, she would clutch the fetus to her breast, take it from the vile temple, bury it in the black, bare