There he stood, this "show young man," well-groomed and smart in his full-dress uniform of second lieutenant of cavalry, the stripes and splashes of yellow suiting his dark skin: a slim, erect figure, not very tall, but a soldier every inch of him, though the wide-apart blue eyes gave the square-chinned face a boyish air of wistfulness, even when he smiled his delightfully childlike, charming smile. Girls glanced at him as they swung past in their partners' arms, noticing how tense was the look on the brown face, and how the straight eyebrows—even blacker than the smooth dark hair—were drawn together in expectant concentration.
Suddenly the door opened. The curtain-raiser was over. The drama of the evening was about to begin.
It seemed wonderful that the band could keep presence of mind to go on playing the "Merry Widow," instead of stopping short with a gasp and crash of instruments, to start again with the "Tango Trance," her dance in "Girls' Love."
She flashed into the ballroom like a dazzling fairy thing, all white and gold and glitter. Because she knew that—so to speak—the curtain would ring up for her entrance, and not an instant before, in the fondness of her heart for young officers she had not even delayed long enough to change the dress she wore as the Contessa Gaëta in the third act of "Girls' Love." The musical comedy had been written for her. In it she had made her first almost startling success two years ago in London, where, according to the newspapers, all young men worth their salt, from dukes down to draymen, had fallen in love with her. She had captured New York, too, and now she and her company were rousing enthusiasm and coining money on their tour of the larger Western cities.
The Gaëta dress looked as if it were made of a million dewdrops turned to diamonds and sprinkled over a lacy spider-web; the web swathing the tall and wandlike figure of Miss Billie Brookton in a way to show that she had all the delicate perfections of a Tanagra statuette.
Despite the distraction of her entrance, followed by that of the little gray lady engaged as her aunt, the musicians had the self-control to go on with their "Merry Widowing," irrelevant as it now seemed. The dancers went on dancing, also, though the dreaded dimness of extinction had fallen upon even the brightest, prettiest girls, who tried to look particularly rapturous in order to prove that nothing had happened. They felt their partners' interest suddenly withdrawn from them and focussed upon the radiance at the door. No use ignoring that Radiance, even if one had in self-defence to pretend that it didn't matter much, and wasn't so marvellously dazzling after all!
"There goes Mr. Doran to welcome her—of course!" said an Omallaha girl lately back from New York. "I wonder if they really are engaged?"
"Why shouldn't they be?" her partner generously wanted to know. (He was married.)
"Well, for one thing, she doesn't seem the sort of woman who'd care to give up her career. She's so self-conscious that she must be selfish, and then—she's older than he is."
"Good heavens, no! She doesn't look nineteen!"