Miss Wentstile started, but the innocence of his intention was evident, and she offered no correction. She bade him good-by with a beaming kindness, and for the rest of the day carried herself with the conscious pride of a woman who could be married if she would.
For the next few days there was about Miss Wentstile a new atmosphere. She snubbed her niece with an air of pride entirely different from her old manner. She dropped hints about there being likely to be a title in the family after all, and as there could be no mystery what she must mean she attempted mystification by seeming to know things about the Count and his family more magnificent than her niece had ever dreamed of. She sent to a school of languages for an instructor in Hungarian, and when none was to be found at once, she purchased a grammar, and ostentatiously studied it before Alice. Altogether she behaved as idiotically as possible, and whether she really intended to go to the extreme of marrying Count Shimbowski and endowing him with her fortune or not, she at least contrived to make her friends believe that she was prepared to go to any length in her absurdity.
The announcement of the engagement of Dick Fairfield and May Calthorpe, which was made at once, of course produced the usual round of congratulatory festivities. May, as it is the moral duty of every self-respecting Bostonian to be, was related to everybody who was socially anybody, and great were the number of dinners which celebrated her decision to marry. It was too late in the season for balls, but that was of little consequence when she and her betrothed could have dined in half a dozen places on the same night had the thing been physically possible.
The real purpose of offering multitudinous dinners to a couple newly engaged has never been fully made clear. On first thought it might seem as if kindness to young folk newly come to a knowledge of mutual love were best shown by letting them alone to enjoy the transports inevitable to their condition. Society has decided otherwise, and keeps them during the early days of their betrothal as constantly as possible in the public eye. Whether this custom is the result of a fear lest the lovers, if left to themselves, might too quickly exhaust their store of fondness, or of a desire to enhance for each the value of the other by a display of general appreciation, were not easy to decide. A cynic might suggest that older persons feel the wisdom of preventing the possibility of too much reflection, or that they give all publicity to the engagement as a means of lessening the chances of any failure of contract. More kindly disposed reasoners might maintain that these abundant festivities are but testimony to the truth of Emerson's declaration that "all the world loves a lover." Philosophy, in the mean time, leaning neither to cynicism on the one hand nor to over-optimism on the other, can see in these social functions at least the visible sign that society instinctively recognizes in the proposed union a contract really public, since while men and women love for themselves they marry for the state.
Alice Endicott and Jack Neligage were naturally asked to many of these dinners, and so it came about that they saw a good deal of each other during the next few weeks. Their recent disagreement at first bred a faint coolness between them, but Jack was too good-natured long to keep up even the pretense of malice, and Alice too forgiving to cherish anger. The need, too, of hiding from the public all unpleasantness would in any case have made it necessary for them to behave as usual, and it is one of the virtues of social conventions that the need of being outwardly civil is apt to blunt the edge of secret resentments. Of course a healthy and genuine hate may be nourished by the irksomeness of enforced suavity, but trifling pique dies a natural death under outward politeness. Alice and Jack were not only soon as friendly as ever, but either from the reaction following their slight misunderstanding or from the effect of the sentimental atmosphere which always surrounds an engaged couple, their attitude became more confidential and friendly than ever.
They sat side by side at a dinner in which the Harbingers were officially testifying their satisfaction in the newly announced engagement. Jack had been doing his duty to the lady on the other side, and turned his face to Alice.
"What is worrying you?" he asked, his voice a little lowered.
She looked at him with a smile.
"What do you mean by that?" she asked. "I was flattering myself that I'd been particularly frolicsome all the evening."
"You have; that's just it."