George took a seat near Miss Van, and a brisk fire of conversation was soon under way between them, varied by frequent bursts of friendly laughter.
Mr. Desmond soon drew out Mr. Watson, and their talk was on stocks, bonds, and the like.
After Mrs. Watson had proved her theory of the laws of the universe, and had almost intoxicated my worthy mother-in-law with her glittering rhetoric, the Watsons took their departure. Before the others followed their example, Miss Van extended an informal invitation to us to attend a “social gathering” at her uncle’s residence the following Wednesday evening.
We went, of course, Mrs. Pinkerton, George, Bessie, and I. It was a pleasant party, and it could not have been otherwise with Miss Van as the hostess. There was a little dancing,—not enough to entitle it to be called a dancing-party; a little card-playing,—not enough to make it a card-party; and there was a vast amount of bright and pleasant conversation, but still one could not name it a converzatione. The company was remarkably good, and Miss Van’s management, although imperceptible, was so skilful that her guests found themselves at their ease, and enjoying themselves, without knowing that their pleasure was more than half due to her finesse.
George was quite a lion, and I envied his easy tact, his unconscious grace of manner, and his faculty of saying bright things without effort. He and Miss Van got on famously together, and she found him an efficient and trustworthy aid in her capacity as hostess.
Mrs. Pinkerton made a lovely wall-flower, and I could not refrain from a wicked chuckle when I saw her sitting on a sofa, exchanging commonplaces with a puffing dowager. Presently, however, I noticed that she had gone, and I found that Mr. Desmond had been kind enough to relieve me from the onerous duty of taking her down to supper.
I wish I had a printed bill of fare of that supper, for even George, fresh from Véfour’s and the Trois Frères Provençaux, acknowledged that it was sublime, magnificent, perfect. We men folks, in fact, talked so much about it afterwards, that Bessie rebuked us by remarking that “men didn’t care about anything so much as eating.”
As Fred Marston remarked to me, while helping himself a third time to the salad, “It’s a stunning old lay-out, isn’t it!” His wife was there, dressed “to kill,” as he himself said, and dancing with every gentleman she could decoy into asking her.
After we had come up from the supper-room, Fred Marston pulled me into a corner, and inflicted on me a volley of stinging observations about the people in the room. George, Bessie, Mrs. Pinkerton, and Miss Van were, I supposed, in one of the other rooms; I had lost sight of them.
“Old Jenks lost a cool hundred thousand fighting the tiger at Saratoga, this last summer,” said Fred. “I had it from a man who backed him. Do you know that young widow talking with him near the end of the piano? No? Why, that’s Mrs. Delascelles, and a devil of a little piece she is,—twice divorced and once widowed, and she isn’t a day over twenty-five. You ought to know her. By the way, that brother of yours is a whole team, with a bull-pup under the wagon. Does he let old Pink boss him around as she does you?”