But this warmer manner of hers opened
Olga's flood-gates so wide, swamped her in such a torrent of sentiment,
that Rose simply took to flight.
There was an element of real maternal pity in Rose's adoption of little
Dolly Darling as her chum. Dolly was obviously as fragile and ephemeral
as a transparent sand-fly. She had nothing that you could call a mind or
a character, even of the most rudimentary sort. She knew nothing, except
how to dance, and she knew that exactly as a kitten knows how to play
with a ball of string; she dreamed of diamonds and wonderful restaurants
and a sardonic hero nine feet tall with a straight nose and a long chin,
who would clutch her passionately in his arms (there was no more real
passion in her than there is in a soap-bubble) and murmur vows of
eternal adoration in her ears.
She was a soap-bubble; that's the figure for her; just an iridescent
reflection, wondrously distorted, of the tawdry life about her--a
reflection, and then nothing!
But just the thin empty frailness of her, her gaiety in the face of
perfectly inevitable destruction, appealed to Rose.
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