Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. [Illustration: Betty Compson and Conway Tearle] THE RUSTLE OF SILK BY COSMO HAMILTON Author of _Scandal_, Etc. GROSSET & DUNLAP Made in the United States of America Copyright, 1922, By Cosmo Hamilton. All rights reserved Published April, 1922 Reprinted April, 1922 (twice) Reprinted June, 1922 Reprinted July, 1922 Printed in the United States of America Contents · PART I · PART II · PART III · PART IV · PART V · PART VI · PART VII · PART VIII PART I I The man had followed her from Marble Arch,—not a mackerel-eyed old man, sensual and without respect, but one who responded to emotions as an artist and was still young and still interested. He had seen her descend from a motor omnibus, had caught his breath at her disturbing femininity, had watched her pass like a sunbeam on the garden side of the road, and in the spirit of a man who sees the materialization of the very essence of woman, turned and followed. All the way along, under branches of trees that were newly peppered with early green, he watched her and saw other men’s heads turn as she passed,—on busses, in taxicabs, in cars and in the infrequent horse-drawn carriage that was like a Chaucerian noun dropped into the pages of a modern book. He saw men stop as he had stopped and catch their breath and then pursue their way reluctantly. He noticed that women, especially passée, tired women, paid her tribute by a flash of smile or a sudden brightness of the eye. There was no conscious effort to attract in the girl’s manner, nothing bizarre or even smart in her clothing. Her young figure, the perfection of form, was plainly dressed. She wore the clothes of a student of the lower middle class, of the small shopkeeping class, and probably either made them herself or bought them off the peg. There was no startling beauty in her face or anything wonderful in her eyes, and certainly nothing of challenge, of coquetry,—nothing but the sublime unself-consciousness of a child. And yet there was so definite and disordering a sense of sex about her that she passed through a very procession of tribute. The man was a dramatist whose business was to play upon the emotions of sex, and to watch this child and the stir she made seemed to him to refute once more the ludicrous attempts of would-be reformers to remold humanity and prohibit the greatest of the urges of nature, and made him laugh. He wondered all the way along not who she was, because that didn’t matter, but what she would do and become,—this girl with her wide-apart eyes, oval face and full red lips, with the nose of a patrician and the sensitive nostrils of a horse,—if she would quickly marry in her own class and drift from early motherhood into a discontented drabness, or burst the bonds and be transferred from her probable back yard into a great conservatory.