Chapter 1
Eunice Norton bit her lips as she stared into the mirror. Her ivory cheeks were flushed, but that roseate hue was not from excitement at having been in the company of a virile and handsome man, but rather from the shameful indignity to which he had subjected her. He had actually dared to kiss her and put his hand on her breast. Worse than that, he had whispered into her ear; "Eunice, you've got the most beautiful titties I've ever seen on a woman. I can't help wanting to feel them."
Of course she had slapped his face and told him, in the haughtiest and most indignant tone she could summon, that she never wanted to see him again. And he had actually dared to laugh at her! "Come off it, Eunice honey," he'd said, grasping her wrist while he stared into her eyes with that maddeningly ironic expression of his, "you're not a goddess, you know. Just a woman of flesh and blood, very handsomely put together and made for a man's enjoyment. And the sooner you come down from your high horse and realize you need a man who can attend to you, the happier you're going to be."
She stated at herself, still feeling her thighs quiver with the violent reaction of aftermath. The infamous beast! So smug and cocksure of himself, so certain that because he was a man and devilishly good looking-yes, she had to admit that-he had the inalienable right to maul her and make insulting advances to her. She ought to have known, from the very first evening she had accepted an engagement with him to go to dinner and the movies. Right in the lobby of the movie theater, he had actually dared to slide his arm round her waist and his hand-he had actually brushed his hand over-over her bottom! She'd gasped and stared at him and he'd given her that infuriating little smile of his and whispered, "Sorry, Miss Norton." And of course she'd thought, well, perhaps it had been an accident. But now she knew him for the lecherous scoundrel he really was-to dare to touch her there and to talk about her private parts so-so indecently!
Of course, she had only consented to go out with him because he was associated in some business venture with her father. Daddy had told her that Mr. Mordaunt was from the North and was forming a mining company with several other Northern investors. His bank was underwriting the stock which was to be issued. He had checked Mr. Mordaunt's credit and business contacts and found them to be of the highest calibre. So, he had told her, it would certainly do not harm to be on good terms with this enterprising gentleman in whose power it lay to make the bank a handsome profit. Business had been very bad ever since the terrible stock-market crash in the fall of 1929 and even now, three years later, it was still shaky. That was why Edward Norton, whose poste as president of the Mainland Bank of Asheville was equally shaky in the face of opposition from his board of trustees, had been so anxious to invite Mordaunt to turn his business over to Mainland. A handsome profit on this stock transaction would be the best rebuttal to the charges that he, Edward Norton, was getting too old to handle the pressing affairs of a bank.
Eunice knew that if her father lost his post as head of Mainland, he would die of grief. All he had in the world was the bank and her, since Mother had died a dozen years ago from an attack of virulent influenza which had claimed many lives in Asheville. She had been closer than ever to him after Mother's passing; now they were inseparable and she knew that he loved her as dearly and relied on her as much as he had Mother. And that was why she had reluctantly consented to Jack Mordaunt's request for a date. Tonight, the occasion of their third such engagement, would mark the end of that tenuous relationship. Even if Daddy wanted her to go out with that awful man, she wouldn't, not ever again. Though of course she'd die before she'd tell Daddy why she felt that way.
Eunice Norton was twenty and a virgin. The mirror showed the reflection of a black-haired young woman of medium height, with slim waist, gently rounded hips and gracefully long, slender thighs. Her face was oval and sensitive and her coiffure, which arranged her glossy black hair in a thick chignon at the nape, combed high away from her arching forehead and the sides to leave her dainty little ears bare, emphasized the tremulous, delicate, almost ethereal quality of her features. Her nose was daintily aquiline, with thin, widely flaring nostril wings; her mouth small but sensuously ripe, the upper lip being fuller than its soft red mate. Her determined little chin was beautifully dimpled and there was an exquisite little brown birthmark near her left cheekbone. Her eyes were wide, large and of a luminous brown, with very thick long lashes and finely chiseled brows surmounting them. When she was angry, her eyes had tiny green flecks at the iris and her brows arched into a haughty bow- just as they had just now when she told Jack Mordaunt she never again wished to be importuned by his presence again.
Edward Norton, after his beloved wife Virginia's death, had undertaken the task of uprearing his only child and being himself an idealist, had surrounded her with beauty, art, poetry and great books, believing that the development of her mind was the most important achievement of all. Now sixty-one, he had been a virtual recluse, occupying himself with work at the Mainland Bank till, at the age of forty, he had chanced to meet Virginia hill at a wedding reception for his cousin. It had been love at first sight-but a kind of pure, ethereal love which ignored the lusty tenets of sex. Himself an only child, Edward Norton had been brought up to understand that continence was a virtue and rejection of physical temptation a triumph of good over evil. And Virginia Hill herself, golden-haired, gentle, reticent, who loved books and paintings and a summer landscape as much as he did, felt very much the same way. Their wedding night had been almost apologetic and Edward Norton had hated himself for having been vulgar enough to ply his beautiful chaste bride with his sensual desire. From that union had come Eunice. and only a few years later, Virginia's always delicate health had begun to fail, so that she fell an easy victim to the epidemic of flu which had ravaged Asheville that tragic winter. That was why Edward Norton had sheltered his daughter, so that she might evoke for him the memory of his exquisitely gentle wife.
She had been sent to private school, as a continuation of that sheltering care, so that she might not be subjected to the rowdyism of the public schools, nor-though naturally Edward Norton saw no reason to mention this to his daughter-to the crude attentions of the opposite sex. Her college, too, was a select finishing school near Montgomery and there again no unseemly contact with the male was possible, except a formal, gracious introduction to the brother or cousin of this or that student chum and always under the strict chaperoning of Miss Felicity Weathers, the spinster dean of the school.
It was Edward Norton's hope that one day his daughter would marry some sensitive, cultured young gentleman, the scion of an illustrious old family, where she might continue to lead the same sheltered, flawless life as the respected bride of a blue-blooded aristocrat. At the same time, he winced at the thought of subjecting his lovely girl to the realities which even so advantageous to marriage must necessarily entail. He shrank from the thought of having to edify her on the processes by which a man and a woman engendered an heir-even as he and his beloved, pure Virginia had to do.
In a word, he was an old fashioned idealist, nurtured on the virtues of honor and integrity, with a serenely unshakable belief that justice would triumph and that evil could be eliminated even in mundane doings. Since his wife's death, he had employed a widowed housekeeper, Mrs. Laura Edmunds, to help not only with the domestic chores of the old, stately frame house on Purtice Street in which he resided with his daughter but also to aid him in Eunice's upbringing. Happily, she shared his views and was as devoted to Eunice as he. And thus, till the meeting with Jack Mordaunt, Eunice Norton had had not the slightest opportunity to become embroiled with the male animal and to learn that if he found her desirable, it was not because of her inordinate chastity and her cultured mind and aristocratic bearing.