Rosalind had been sitting most of them out, instead of dancing them. There was not the least doubt the crowd was "mixed." Besides, after one experiment with Morton, one with the Jones boy, and a mere recollection of other dances with Reggie Williams, Rosalind found that sitting out was the nearest approach to having a good time.
Incidentally it furnished odd minutes for reflection, for it was possible to despatch her squires upon errands and thus obtain solitude. Her fertility of invention, when it came to errands, was quite astonishing; at the fact that all of the errands were useless, her conscience was pricked not at all.
She was a woman with a problem that challenged her. Back at the Witherbees' they gave her no time for cogitation; there seemed to be a universal obsession that somebody had to entertain her.
And Rosalind was a difficult person to entertain. She chose her own amusements and she resented having diversion thrust upon her.
It was not at all a matter of hardship—save to others—for Rosalind to be exceedingly untractable and unpleasant, both in manner and speech and the general loftiness and disdain of her bearing. If ever there lived a lady who needed, for the good of her soul and her conduct, to be clubbed briskly on the head by some conscientious caveman, dragged by the hair to his domicile, and set to pounding corn between two stones, that lady was Rosalind Chalmers.
And she was beginning to wonder if some such proceeding was not actually under way. The caveman, of course, was Sam. She knew he was not a real caveman, even, perhaps, of the kind that possess a veneer of civilization; yet he behaved like one.
His manner toward her was shocking and uncouth, as well as without explanation. He had contrived to involve her—she did not admit any of the contriving to be of her own—in a series of vulgar and embarrassing events; and she felt with a keen degree of uneasiness that he proposed to capitalize her misfortunes or misadventures in a manner as yet undisclosed and therefore peculiarly to be dreaded. Who he was, what he was, even why he was, Rosalind did not know.
Had she been free to ask questions and to conduct a systematic investigation perhaps something might be learned. But necessity, by which she really meant the veiled threats of the boatman himself, bade her be cautious.
In truth, Rosalind for once in her life was timid, although she would have perished rather than acknowledge it, even to herself. It was no physical fear, awakened by a dread of something that might happen to herself. Rather it was a more or less abstract apprehension, yet none the less poignant because of that fact.
It shaped itself into the idea that in some manner, and perhaps at some remote time, something would be done or said or even whispered that would bring into ridicule the Rosalind Chalmers who was known and recognized only by the fixed and inexorable standard of Hamersley's "Social Register." Not for all her wealth and her distinction would she be unmasked before her fellow denizens of the book!