"You are not going to wear gloves?" said Mrs. Carew, interrupting herself in her surprise. "It's only a small tea-party."
"No entertainment given by you, dear friend, can be called small; it is not a question of numbers, but of scope, and your scope is always of the largest," replied the mistress of East Angels, beginning to cover her small fingers with the insignia of ceremony. "Our only thought was to do you honor, we are very glad to have this little opportunity."
Garda put her gloves in her pocket. She had the white ones.
"My daughter," said Mrs. Thorne, admonishingly.
"But, mamma, I don't want to wear them; I don't like them."
"We are obliged, in this world at least, my child, to wear many things, gloves included, which we do not especially like," said Mrs. Thorne, with the air of expecting to wear only the choicest garb (gloves included) in the next. "Do not interfere with my plan for doing honor to our dear friend."
Garda, with a grimace, took out the gloves and put them on, while the dear friend looked on with much interest. There was not a trace of jealousy in her glance, a Gwinnet, in truth, could not have cause for jealousy; she was really admiring the little New England woman's inspiration. "Gloves have never been worn here at small tea-parties," she said to Evert Winthrop afterwards. "But she thought that your aunt and Mrs. Harold, coming as they do from New York, would have them, and so she unearthed those two old pairs. There is really no limit to that woman's energy; I verily believe that if an East Indian prince should be wrecked off Gracias, she would find an elephant to receive him with! Her courage is inexhaustible, and if she had any money at all, she'd move the world—like Archimedes, wasn't it, who only wanted a point for his lever? To be sure, that is the great thing—the point, and Mr. Carew used always to say that I forgot mine. I told him that he could pick them up and put them in himself if he missed them so much, but he said that anybody could put them in, but that it took a real genius to leave them out, as I did." Here the good lady laughed heartily. "It was only his joking way, of course," she added; "you see, Mr. Carew was a lawyer."
The gloves having been duly put on, the three ladies descended to the front drawing-room, where Mrs. Thorne seated herself in an attitude which might have been described as suggesting a cultured expectation. Her little figure remained erect, not touching the back of her chair; her hands, endued with the gloves, were folded lightly; her countenance expressed the highest intelligence, chastened by the memory of the many trials through which she had passed; this, at least, was what she intended it to express.
The fall of the gate-latch was now heard again.
"Had we not better be standing?" suggested their hostess, in a hurried whisper. It was so many years since she had opened her old house for what she called "evening company" that she felt fluttered and uncertain—embarrassed, as imaginative people always are, by the number of things that occurred to her, things she might do.