Her uncle met her at the doorway of the drawing-room. “This is not little Elsie!” he said. “Why, good heavens, your father didn’t write us his Elsie had grown up into anything like you!”
Immediately he took her upon his arm and turned to cross the room with her, going toward the dozen young people clustered about Cornelia.
But Cornelia came running to her cousin. “You’re dazzling!” she whispered, and it was obvious that Cornelia’s friends had the same impression. They stopped talking abruptly as Elsie entered the room, and they remained in an eloquent state of silence until Cornelia began to make their names known to the visitor. Even after that, they talked in lowered voices until they went out to the dining-room.
XXIV
TRANSFIGURATION
THEY were livelier at the table, but not nearly so noisy as Mamie Ford and Paul Reamer and their intimates would have been at a dinner party at home, Elsie thought; though this was but a hasty and vague comparison flitting through her mind. She was not able to think definitely about anything for a time: she was too dazzled by being dazzling. Her clearest thought was an inquiry: Was this she, herself, and, if she was indeed Elsie Hemingway, were these queer, kind, new people now about her quite sane?
The tall young man with the long face who sat at her left talked to her as much as he could, being hampered by the circumstance that the fair-haired short young man on her right did his best to talk to her all the time, except when she spoke. Then both of them listened with deference; and so did a third young man directly across the table from her. More than that, she could not look about her without encountering the withdrawing glances of other guests of both sexes, though some of these glances, not from feminine orbs, were in no polite flurry to withdraw, but remained thoughtfully upon her as long as she looked their way. Could it be Elsie Hemingway upon whom fond eyes of youth thus so sweetly lingered?
Too centred upon the strange experience to think much about these amazing people except as adjuncts to her transfiguration, she nevertheless decided that she liked best the tall gentleman at her left. He was not so young as the others, appearing to be as far advanced toward middle-age as twenty-seven—or possibly even twenty-nine—and she decided that his long, irregular face was “interesting.” She asked him to “straighten out the names” of the others for her, hoping that he would straighten out his own before he finished.
He began with Lily Dodge. “Our prettiest girl,” he explained, honestly unconscious of what his emphasis implied. “That is, she’s been generally considered so since your cousin Anne was married. The young man on Miss Dodge’s right and in such a plain state of devotion is named Henry Burnett just now.”
“Just now? Does his name change from time to time?”