"Never, really; it seems to have given Mabel Tufts courage to hold on another year. I hear she's coming."
"Yes," said Mrs. Underwood scornfully. "It's too absurd. Why, her own nephews are out in society! They go about asking the other fellows, 'Have you met my aunt?' Ned Winship has made a song with those words for a chorus, and the boys all sing it. And yet, Mabel is very pretty still—I wonder no one has married her."
"Mabel Tufts was never the sort of girl men care to marry."
Margaret wondered in her own mind at the sort of girl Mr. Thorndike Freeman had cared to marry. She tried to keep her courage up, but it grew weaker as she followed the other ladies upstairs and took off her wraps and pulled on her gloves as fast as she could, while Mrs. Underwood stood impatiently waiting, and Mrs. Freeman looked Margaret over beginning with her feet and working upward.
"Have you a partner engaged, Miss Parke?" asked Mrs. Underwood suddenly.
"No"—faltered Margaret, unable to add anything to the bare fact.
"I am afraid you won't get one then, there are so many more girls than men."
The "so many more" turned out, in fact, to be two or three, but Margaret had no hope. She felt that whoever got a partner, it would not be she. The dancers paired off, the seats were drawn, the music began, and she found herself sitting by Mrs. Underwood on the back row of raised benches, with a quarter view of that lady's face, as she chatted with Mrs. Thorndike Freeman on the other side. There were only two other girls, as far as Margaret could make out, among the chaperons. Some of the latter were young enough, no doubt, but their dress and careless easy manner marked the difference. A pretty, thin, very fashionable-looking elderly young lady sat near Margaret;—perhaps the luckless Mabel Tufts; but she seemed to know plenty of people, and was perpetually being taken out for turns. She laughed and talked freely, as if defying her position, and Margaret wished she could carry it off so well, little guessing how fiercely the other was envying her for the simplicity that might not know how bad her plight was, and the youth that had still such boundless possibilities in store. Another small, pale girl in a dark silk sat far back, and perhaps had only come to look on,—too barefaced a pretence for Margaret in her terribly obtrusive pink gown. She could not even summon resolution to refuse young Underwood when he asked her for a turn, though she wished she had after he had deposited her in her chair again and stalked off with the air of one who has done his duty.
The griefs of a young woman who has no partner for the German, though perhaps not so lasting as those of one who lacks bread and shelter, are worse while they do last, for there may be no shame in lacking bread, and one can, and generally does, take to begging before starving. As the giraffe is popularly supposed to suffer exceptionally from sore throat, owing to the length of that portion of his frame, so did Margaret, as she sat through one figure, and then through another, feel her torture through every nerve of her five feet, eight inches. What would she not have given to be smaller, perhaps even plainer,—somehow less conspicuous. Man after man strolled past her, and lounged in front of her, chatting and laughing with Mrs. Thorndike Freeman; but it was not possible they could help seeing her, however they might ignore her.
"Le jour sera dur, mais il se passera."