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Tito laughed loyously. "How can I expect you to have the face and hody like that, and be shut up like a nun?"
LOMBARDI, Ltd.
In which it is revealed that the rarest gift of money is leisure to those in pursuit of love.
THE atelier of Tito Lombardi shone warm and glowing and rose-hued in the spring sunshine which crept through its spacious skylight. A brilliant medley of tapestry, statues, draperies and antiques of all kinds, it might have been the favorite room of a millionaire connoisseur. Nevertheless, it was known to thousands on the social register as the sanctum-sanctorum of the most exclusive designer this side of Paris.
At this precise moment, however, the master of the estabhshment was not concerned with robes and fabrics. He was standing beside the model throne engaged in a half earnest, half bantering conversation with a girl who posed there in an easy attitude although she was obviously conscious of the power of her beauty. For her beauty was undeniable in spite of the shallow brown eyes and the selfish lines of her wonderfully carved lips. But these defects are not apparent when one is twenty and a symphony of curves, flesh-tints and a certain charm. And Phyllis Manning was all of this and more.
'"And do I not give you lots of things and spend my monee to make you happy?'.' ..Tito was asking anxiously, his dark, vivid face upturned to the blond
By
DOROTHY ALLISON
head of the girl. "And is there anything between us which is not good? No, no. Carissima."
"You're just the best man ahve," Phyllis answered purringly. "When I think what you have done for me! The other girls just die of envy. And to think you've never even kissed me! Why have you never kissed me, Tito?"
Tito smiled with a tlash of white teeth and then grew serious instantly.
"Listen, bambina, I tell you. Me, I am queer fellow. All the girls, the pretty girls who work here, they not understand me. One girl — that little what you call imp Daisy — she think when she come here that she must let me give her the kiss to hold her job. She follow me around my shop to make what she call 'the sacrifice.' At first I no understand, then I do and I get the scare. This I am not used to. All my girls they are good girls, they make 'no sacrifice.' I do not — what you say — know they are alive.
"Do you know why this is so, carissimo?" he went on, his soft brown eyes growing more tender. "It is because one woman she has all my dreams and hopes. When she say, 'Tito I love you, I be your wife,' then there will be that kiss for which I wait so long. But till then, never."
Phyllis seated herself more artistically on the model stool and answered his passionate tones in her own icy, composed voice
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