My Lord, why do you want to go to Mandeville? she thought. Her palms flashed, smacking cleanly, and Jenny examined her hand with distaste. Where do they carry so much blood, she wondered, rubbing her palm on the back of her stocking. And so young, too. I hope that’s the last one. It must have been, for there was no sound save a small lapping whisper of water and a troubling faraway suggestion of brass broken by a monotonous thumping of feet over her head. Dancing still. You really don’t have to dance at all, thought Jenny, yawning into the glass, examining with interest the pink and seemingly endless curve of her gullet, when the door opened and the girl, Patricia, entered the room. She wore a raincoat over her pajamas and Jenny saw her reflected face in the mirror.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” the niece replied, “I thought you’d have stayed up there prancing around with ’em.”
“Lord,” Jenny said, “you don’t have to dance all your life, do you? You don’t seem to be there.”
The niece thrust her hands into the raincoat pockets and stared about the small room. “Don’t you close that window when you undress?” she asked. “Standing wide open like that—”
Jenny put the mirror down. “That window? I don’t guess there’s anybody out there this time of night.”
The niece went to the port and saw a pale sky bisected laterally by a dark rigidity of water. The moon spread her silver hand on it; a broadening path of silver, and in the path the water came alive ceaselessly, no longer rigid. “I guess not,” she murmured. “The only man who could walk on water is dead. . Which one is yours?” She threw off the raincoat and turned toward the two berths. The lower garment of her pajamas was tied about her waist with a man’s frayed necktie.
“Is he?” Jenny murmured with detachment. “That one,” she answered vaguely, twisting her body to examine the back of one reverted leg. After a while she looked up. “That ain’t mine. That’s Mrs. What’s-her-name’s you are in.”
“Well, it don’t make any difference.” The niece lay flat, spreading her arms and legs luxuriously. “Gimme a cigarette. Have you got any?”
“I haven’t got any. I don’t smoke.” Jenny’s leg was satisfactory, so she unwrithed herself.
“You don’t smoke? Why don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny replied, “I just don’t.”
“Look around and see if Eva’s got some somewhere.” The niece raised her head. “Go on: look in her things, she won’t mind.”
Jenny hunted for cigarettes in a soft blond futility. “Pete’s got some,” she remarked after a time. “He bought twenty packages just before we left town, to bring on the boat.”
“Twenty packages? Good Lord, where’d he think we were going? He must have been scared of shipwreck or something.”
“I guess so.”
“Gabriel’s pants,” the niece said. “That’s all he brought, was it? Just cigarettes? What did you bring?”
“I brought a comb” —Jenny dragged her little soiled dress over her head; her voice was muffled—“and some rouge.” She shook out her drowsy gold hair and let the dress fall to the floor. “Pete’s got some, though,” she repeated, thrusting the dress beneath the dressing table with her foot.
“I know,” the niece rejoined, “and so has Mr. Fairchild. And so has the steward, if Mark Frost hasn’t borrowed ’em all. And I saw the captain smoking one, too. But that’s not doing me any good.”
“No,” agreed Jenny placidly. Her undergarment was quite pink, enveloping her from shoulder to knee with ribbons and furbelows. She loosened a few of these and stepped sweetly and rosily out of it, casting it also under the table.
“You aren’t going to leave ’em there, are you?” the niece asked. “Why don’t you put ’em on the chair?”
“Mrs. — Mrs. Wiseman puts hers on the chair.”
“Well, you got here first: why don’t you take it? Or hang ’em on those hooks behind the door?”
“Hooks?” Jenny looked at the door. “Oh. . They’ll be all right there, I guess.” She stripped off her stockings and laid them on the dressing table. Then she turned to the mirror again and picked up her comb. The comb passed through her fair, soft hair with a faint sound, as of silk, and her hair lent to Jenny’s divine body a halo like an angel’s. The remote Victrola, measured feet, a lapping of water, came into the room.
“You’ve got a funny figure,” the niece remarked after a while, calmly, watching her.
“Funny?” repeated Jenny, looking up with soft belligerence. “It’s no funnier than yours. At least my legs don’t look like birds’ legs.”
“Neither do mine,” the other replied with complacence, flat on her back. “Your legs are all right. I mean, you are kind of thick through the middle for your legs; kind of big behind for them.”
“Well, why not? I didn’t make it like that, did I?”
“Oh, sure. I guess it’s all right if you like it to be that way.”
Without apparent effort Jenny dislocated her hip and stared downward over her shoulder. Then she turned sideways and accepted the mute proffering of the mirror. Reassured, she said, “Sure, it’s all right. I expect to be bigger than that, in front, some day.”
“So do I — when I have to. But what do you want one for?”
“Lord,” said Jenny, “I guess I’ll have a whole litter of ’em. Besides, I think they’re kind of cute, don’t you?”
The sound of the Victrola came down, melodious and nasal, and measured feet marked away the lapping of waves. The light was small and inadequate, sunk into the ceiling, and Jenny and the niece agreed that they were kind of cute and pink. Jenny was quite palpably on the point of coming to bed and the other said:
“Don’t you wear any nightclothes?”
“I can’t wear that thing Mrs. What’s-her-name lent me,” Jenny replied. “You said you were going to lend me something, only you didn’t. If I’d depended on you on this trip, I guess I’d be back yonder about ten miles, trying to swim home.”
“That’s right. But it doesn’t make any difference what you sleep in, does it?. . Turn off the light.” Light followed Jenny rosily as she crossed the room, it slid rosily upon her as she turned obediently toward the switch beside the door. The niece lay flat on her back gazing at the unshaded globe. Jenny’s angelic nakedness went beyond her vision and suddenly she stared at nothing with a vague orifice vaguely in the center of it, and beyond the orifice a pale moonfilled sky.
Jenny’s bare feet hissed just a little on the uncarpeted floor and she came breathing softly in the dark, and her hand came out of the dark. The niece moved over against the wall. The round orifice in the center of the dark was obscured, then it reappeared, and breathing with a soft blond intentness Jenny climbed gingerly into the berth. But she bumped her head anyway, lightly, and she exclaimed “ow” with placid surprise. The bunk heaved monstrously, creaking; the porthole vanished again, then the berth became still and Jenny sighed with a soft explosive sound.