Sylvia had not been able once to look away from him since he began to speak. Her mouth was a little open in her white face, her eyes fixed with a painful intensity on his. He moistened his lips with his tongue. "Sylvia—it's all right—isn't it?"
With no change of expression in her strained face, Sylvia nodded. As suddenly and apparently as automatically she took a backward step.
The young man made a great stride towards her—there was a sound of quick strokes on the ice and—"BOO!" shouted the hilarious young man, bursting between them at railroad speed. He executed a marvelous pirouette and returned instantly, calling out, "Less spooning in the corners if you please—or if it's got to be, let me in!" He was followed closely by a string of young men and girls, playing snap-the-whip. They "snapped" just as they reached Jerry. The end girl flew off and bumped, screaming with joy, into Jerry's arms. He looked furiously over her head towards Sylvia, but she had been enveloped in a ring and was being conveyed away to the accompaniment of the usual squeals and shouts. The Colonel had come down to take them all back, she was informed, and was waiting for them with the sleigh.
CHAPTER XIX
AS A BIRD OUT OF A SNARE
Sylvia dressed for dinner literally like one in a dream. Outwardly she was so calm that she thought she was so inwardly. It was nothing like so exciting as people said, to get engaged, she thought as she brushed out her hair and put it up in a big, gleaming knot. Here she had been engaged for a whole hour and a half, and was getting calmer every minute, instead of the reverse. She astonished herself by the lucidity of her brain, although it only worked by snatches—there being lacunae when she could not have told what she was doing. And yet, as she had approached the house, sitting again beside the Colonel, she had looked with a new thrill of interest at its imposing battlemented façade. The great hall had seemed familiar to her already as she stepped across it on her way to the stairs, her feet had pressed the rugs with assurance, she had been able to be quite nonchalant about refusing the services of the maid who offered to help her dress.
It was true that from time to time she suddenly flushed or paled; it was true that her mind seemed incapable of the slightest consecutive thought; it was true that she seemed to be in a dream, peopled by crazily inconsequent images—she had again and again a vision, startlingly vivid, of the red-twigged osier beside which she had stood; it was true that she had a slight feeling of vertigo when she tried to think ahead of the next moment—but still she was going ahead with her unpacking and dressing so steadily that she marveled. She decided again from the depth of her experience that getting engaged was nothing like so upsetting an event as people made out. She thrust the last pin into her hair and tipped her head preeningly before the big triplicate mirror—the first time she had ever encountered this luxury outside of a ready-made clothes shop. The yellow chiffon came out from the trunk in perfect condition, looking like a big, silk-petaled flower as she slipped it on over her bare shoulders, and emerged above, triumphant and yet half afraid to look at herself in the mirror lest she should see that her home-made toilet had not "the right look." One glance satisfied even her jealous eagerness. It had exactly the right look—that is, it looked precisely like the picture from which she had copied it. She gazed with naïve satisfaction at the faithfulness with which her reflected appearance resembled that of the Parisian demi-mondaine whose photograph she had seen, and settled on her slim, delicately modeled shoulders the straps of shirred and beaded chiffon which apparently performed the office of keeping her dress from sliding to the floor. In reality, under its fluid, gauzy draperies, it was constructed on a firm, well-fitting, well-fastened foundation of opaque cloth which quite adequately clothed the young body, but its appearance was of a transparent cloud, only kept from floating entirely away by those gleaming straps on the shoulders, an effect carefully calculated in the original model, and inimitably caught by Sylvia's innocent fingers.
She turned herself about, artlessly surprised to see that her neck and shoulders looked quite like those of the women in the fashion-plates and the magazine illustrations. She looked at the clock. It was early yet. She reflected that she never could take the time other girls did in dressing. She wondered what they did. What could one do, after one's bath was taken, one's hair done, and one's gown donned—oh, of course, powder! She applied it liberally, and then wiped away every grain, that being what she had seen older girls do in the Gymnasium dressing-room. Then with a last survey of her face, unaltered by the ceremonial with the powder-puff, she stepped to the door.
But there, with her hand on the knob, she was halted by an inexplicable hesitation about opening the door and showing herself. She looked down at her bare shoulders and bosom, and faintly blushed. It was really very, very low, far lower than any dress she had ever worn! And the fact that Eleanor Hubert, that all the "swell" girls wore theirs low, did not for the moment suffice her—it was somehow different—their showing their shoulders and her showing her own. She could not turn the knob and stood, irresolute, frowning vaguely, though not very deeply disquieted. Finally she compromised by taking up a pretty spangled scarf Aunt Victoria had sent her, wrapping it about her like a shawl, in which quaint garb she went out in more confidence, and walked down the hall to the stairway. Half-way down she met Colonel Fiske just coming up to dress. Seeing one of his young guests arrayed for the evening he made her his compliments, the first words rather absent and perfunctory. But when he was aware which guest she was, he warmed into a pressing and personal note, as his practised eyes took in the beauty, tonight startlingly enhanced by excitement, of the girl's dark, shining eyes, flushed cheeks, and white neck and arms. He ended by lifting her hand, in his florid way, and pressing it to his white mustache for a very fervent kiss. Sylvia blushed prettily, meeting his hot old eyes with a dewy unconsciousness, and smiling frankly up into the deeply lined carnal face with the simple-hearted pleasure she would have felt at the kind word of any elderly man. The Colonel seemed quite old to her—much older than her father—like Professor Kennedy.
"Jerry's in the library, waiting," his father announced with a sly laugh. "I wondered at the young rascal's being dressed so far ahead of time." He turned reluctantly and went on up the stairs, leaving Sylvia to go forward to her first meeting alone with the man she had promised to marry. As she descended the long flight of stairs, her scarf, loosened by her movement, slipped unobserved in her excitement and hung lightly about her shoulders.