"Well, after all, life has its compensations," says Mr. Beauclerk, sinking upon the satin lounge beside Miss Kavanagh, and giving way to a rapturous sigh. He is looking very big and very handsome. His close-cropped eminently aristocratic head is thrown a little back, to give full play to the ecstatic smile he is directing at Joyce.
She bears it wonderfully. She receives it indeed with all the amiable imbecility of a person who doesn't understand what on earth you are talking about. Whether this reception of his little opening speech—so carefully prepared—puzzles or nettles Mr. Beauclerk there is no way of learning. He makes no sign.
"I thought I should never be able to get a dance with you; you see,"—smiling—"when one is the belle of the evening, one grows difficult. But you might have kept a fifth or sixth for a poor outsider like me. An old friend too."
"Old friends don't count at a dance, I'm afraid," says she, with a smile as genial as his own; "though for the matter of that you could have had the first; no one—hard as it may be to make you believe it—had asked the belle of the evening for that."
This is not quite true. Many had asked for it, Dysart amongst others; but she had kept it open for—the one who didn't want it. However, fibs of this sort one blinks at where pretty girls are the criminals. Her tone is delicately sarcastic. She would willingly suppress the sarcasm altogether as beneath her, but she is very angry; and when a woman is angry there is generally somebody to pay.
"Oh! that first!" says he, with a gesture of impatience. "I shan't forgive Isabel in a hurry about that; she ruined my evening—up to this. However," throwing off as it were unpleasant memories by a shake of his head, "don't let me spoil my one good time by dwelling upon a bad one. Here I am now, at all events; here is comfort, here is peace. The hour I have been longing for is mine at last."
"It might have been yours considerably earlier," says Miss Kavanagh with very noteworthy deliberation, unmoved by his lover-like glances, which after all have more truth in them than most of his declarations. She sits playing with her fan, and with a face expressionless as any sphinx.
"Oh! my dear girl!" says Mr. Beauclerk reproachfully, "how can you say that! You know in one's sister's house one must—eh? And she laid positive commands on me——"
"To dance the first dance with Miss Maliphant?"
"Now, that's not like you," says Mr. Beauclerk very gently. "It's not just. When I found Miss Dunscombe engaged for that ridiculous quadrille, what could I do? You were engaged to Blake. I was looking aimlessly round me, cursing my luck in that I had not thrown up even my sister's wishes and secured before it was too late the only girl in the room I cared to dance with when Isabel came again. 'Not dancing,' says she; 'and there's Miss Maliphant over there, partnerless!'"