A. Verse
The Violation of Marcia Thomaston
V-1106
“Now, my dear, I’ve taken care of all the preparations… you won’t have to bother your lovely head about a single thing, outside of being attentive to the attentive and important gentlemen who attend the affair,” said the effete and pretentious Mrs. Elspeth Thomaston, languidly applying her soignй and jeweled hand to her coiffure, fresh from the salon of Madame Dubonnet off Fifth Avenue.
“Very well, Mother; but I’m sure I’ll be bored to tears, really,” responded her eighteen-year-old daughter Marcia, reclining indolently on a chaise lounge, her eyes flitting over the pages of a new Faith Baldwin novel, a box of imported chocolates beside her at a taboret. Nor did she gaze up from her perusal of the saccharine tome to notice her mother’s shallow smile and leave-taking.
For well aware was this aristocratic and inordinately egotistical young offspring of one of New York’s most elite families that she was the center of attraction; that her debut was scheduled-as one of the season’s most elaborate and expensive affairs-for the following night.
Beautiful, snobbish, undisciplined and affected to an irritating degree, Marcia intended to remain the center of attraction as long as. her attributes of beauty remained to her.
And she was beautiful-that might truly be said of her.
Brunette, with hair as black as her perfect and well-cared-for skin was ivory white, tall, svelte, magnificently proportioned, with breasts as full, as firm and as delectably molded as ripe pears, with sleek hips that proclaimed her superbly suited to the rites of love, with long, lissome and resilient thighs whose appetizing columns never failed to draw the admiration of male eyes when she entered the swankiest of nightclubs invariably gowned in dazzling red or black satin that sheathed her almost to the point of lewdness, with low-cut back and bosom and naked and flawlessly sculptured slender arms which she delighted in sheathing with expensive and incredibly thin black suede gloves to her elbows.
Aware of her beauty, yes and triumphantly enthroned in its aura-but, belying that beauty with the vain, supercilious and selfish behavior of a young schoolgirl who knows little of life save that all its worries do not exist for her.
Such was Marcia Thomaston, who reclined indolently on the chaise lounge of her apartment, clad in a costly lace-festooned black silk negligee, her dainty feet sheathed in pretty Russian mules, fur-lined and delighting her with the sensuous feeling of luxury and comfort.
Her beauty naturally drew men to her as a flame draws moths; until her suitors, discovering her emptiness and affectation, evaded burning in that clear, chill flame wherein no true passion was kindled, no reciprocal response, or sincerity of emotion.
One suitor she had who had been most persistent of all-and this was strange, for he was a worldly and debonair man nearly thirty, sophisticated, polished in bearing, enormously wealthy-the sole heir to an oil fortune left him by an uneducated father who had “struck it rich.” Gregory Matthews, this questing swain, fascinated by the sensual beauty of Marcia, had courted her for a year, wined and dined her, ingratiated himself with her father and mother- who certainly approved of the possibility of such a liaison-and had proposed to her several times.