“Missy! It's ten minutes to six! And you haven't even combed your hair!” It was mother at the door again.
The first guest arrived before Missy had got her hair “smoothed up”—no time, tonight, to try any rippling, wanton effects. She could hear the swelling sound of voices and laughter in the distance—oh, dreadful! Her fingers became all thumbs as she sought to get into the dotted swiss, upside down.
Mother came in just in time to extricate her, and buttoned the dress with maddeningly deliberate fingers.
“Now, don't fret yourself into a headache, dear,” she said in a voice meant to be soothing. “The party won't run away—just let yourself relax.”
Relax!
The musicians, out on the side porch, were already beginning their blaring preparations when the hostess, at last, ran down the stairs and into the front parlour. Her agitation had no chance to subside before they must file out to the dining room. Missy hadn't had time before to view the completely embellished dining room and, now, in all its glory and grandeur, it struck her full force: the potted palms screening the windows through which floated strains of music, streamers of blue and gold stretching from the chandelier to the four corners of the room in a sort of canopy, the long white table with its flowers and gleaming silver—
It might almost have been the scene of a function at Chetwoode Manor itself!
In a kind of dream she was wafted to the head of the table; for, since the function was at her house, Missy had been voted the presiding place of honour. It is a very great responsibility to sit in the presiding place of honour. From that conspicuous position one leads the whole table's activities: conversing to the right, laughing to the left, sharply on the lookout for any conversational gap, now and then drawing muted tete-a-tetes into a harmonic unison. She is, as it were, the leader of an orchestra of which the individual diners are the subsidiary instruments. Upon her watchful resourcefulness hangs the success of a dinner-party. But Missy, though a trifle fluttered, had felt no anxiety; she knew so well just how Lady Chetwoode had managed these things.
The hostess must also, of course, direct the nutrimental as well as the conversational process of the feast. She is served first, and takes exactly the proper amount of whatever viand in exactly the proper way and manipulates it with exactly the proper fork or knife or spoon. But Missy had felt no anticipatory qualms.
She was possessed of a strange, almost a lightheaded feeling. Perhaps the excitement of the day, the rush at the last, had something to do with it. Perhaps the spectacle of the long, adorned table, the scent of flowers, the sound of music, the dark eyes of Mr. Edward Brown who was seated at her right hand.