“What! tired of dancing already?” cried Sara, flitting to the corner where Olive sat.
“I have not danced once yet,” Olive answered, rather piteously.
“Come—shall I get you a partner?” said Sara, carelessly.
“No, no; every one is strange to me here. If you please, and if it would not trouble you, Sara, I had much rather dance with you.”
Sara consented with a tolerably good grace; but there was a slight shadow on her face, which somewhat pained her friend.
“Is she ashamed of me, I wonder?” thought Olive. “Perhaps, because I am not beautiful. Yet, no one ever told me I was very disagreeable to look at. I will see.”
As they danced, she watched in the tall mirror Sara's graceful, floating image, and the little pale figure that moved beside her. There was a contrast! Olive, who inherited all her mother's love of beauty, spiritualised by the refinement of a dawning artist-soul, felt keenly the longing regret after physical perfection. She went through the dance with less spirit, and in her heart there rung the idle echoes of some old song she knew:
“I see the courtly ladies stand,
With their dark and shining hair;
And I coldly turn aside to weep—
Oh, would that I were fair!”
The quadrille ended, she hid herself in her old corner; and Sara, whose good nature led her to perform this sacrifice to friendship, seemed to smile more pleasantly and affectionately when it was over. At least Olive thought so. She did not see her beautiful idol again for some time; and feeling little interest in any other girl, and none at all in the awkward Oldchurch “beaux,” she took consolation in her own harmless fashion. This was hiding herself under the thick curtains, and looking out of the window at the moon.
Sara's voice was heard close by, talking to a young girl whom Olive knew. But Olive was too shy to join them. She greatly preferred her friend the moon.