“See him looking at those chairs?” said she to Frothingham.
Frothingham nodded.
“He’s awfully sour at the etiquette here,” she went on. “I suppose he’s afraid the country’ll find out about it and cut up rough. He’s smashing right and left, and everyone’s wondering when he’ll throw out the gilt chairs.”
But his courage apparently failed him, for he and his wife advanced to the “thrones” and seated themselves. No one else sat, the men moving about to get the partners indicated on the little gilt-edged crested cards they had found in envelopes addressed to them and laid upon the tables in the coat-rooms. Frothingham examined Elsie Pope and saw that she was small and slight, square in the shoulders, thin in the neck, her hair of an uncertain shade of brown, her eyes commonplace, her features irregular. “She looks a good-tempered soul,” he said to himself, searching resolutely for merits. And then he noted that her hands were red, and that she had flat, rather wide wrists. “A good, plain soul,” he added. He sat silent, waiting for her to begin to entertain him—he hadn’t got used to the American custom of the men entertaining the women; and the New York and Boston women, acquainted with the British way, had humoured him. But he waited in vain. At last he stole a glance at her, and noted a gleam in the corner of her eye, the flutter of a humour-curve at the corner of her mouth. “A shrewd little thing, I suspect,” he thought. And he said to her, “No—really, I don’t bite.”
Her eyes twinkled. “I was beginning to be afraid you didn’t bark, either,” she said.
His expression retired behind his eyeglass. “Nor do I, unless I’m bid.”
“I like to be talked to—I’d so much rather criticise than be criticised.”
“What do you like to hear about?” he asked.
“About the man who’s talking. It’s the only subject he’ll really put his heart into, isn’t it?”
Frothingham smiled faintly, as if greeting an old and not especially admired acquaintance.