“Why, of course!”
“No one——” He faltered. “No one ever saw you do it?”
“Why, of course. It’s a little difficult to explain this to you, Charles, but all those dances that used to seem so shocking to us when we went to look on at them in foreign places—well, it turned out that they were perfectly all right and proper when you dance them yourself. Of course I danced them, and enjoyed them very much; and besides, it’s a wholesome exercise and good for the health. Everybody danced them. People who’d given up dancing for years—the oldest kind of people—danced them. It began the greatest revival of dancing the world’s ever seen, Charles, and the——”
He interrupted her. “Go a little slower, please,” he said, and applied a handkerchief to his forehead. “About your seeming to lose your authority with Jeannette——”
“Yes; I was trying to tell you. She used to sit up watching us dancing in the hotel ballroom that summer, and I just couldn’t make her go to bed! That was the first time she deliberately disobeyed me, but it was a radical change in her; and I’ve never since then seemed to have any weight with her—none at all; she’s just done exactly what she pleased. I’ve often thought perhaps that governess had a bad influence on her.”
He wiped his forehead again, and inquired: “You say she’s given dances while you’ve been away with me?”
“Oh, she asks plenty of married people, of course.”
“And it wouldn’t be any use to telegraph her to postpone this one?”
“No. She’d just go ahead, and when we got home, she’d be rather annoyed with me for thinking a dance could be postponed at the last minute. We must make the best of it.”
“I suppose so.”