“There were dances here before you were born or thought of, my child. It may seem very strange to you,” said Claire ironically, “but I happen to have been rather an unusually good dancer.”
Her annoyance was so obvious in her voice and manner—Claire never attempts to dissemble her feelings—that Nancy Fazackerly characteristically came to the rescue.
“I love to see you dance, Lady Flower,” she said earnestly. “I believe you’d even make the new jazz dances look graceful.”
She said it so naturally and sincerely that I felt I was an ungrateful brute for reflecting that she had probably never in her life seen Claire dance a step.
Sometimes I think that a long course of being told that she is the worst housekeeper, or the most inadequate manager, in the world, varied only by the nerve-shattering experience of plates hurled at her head, has altogether destroyed Nancy’s capacity for distinguishing fact from fiction. I am sure that she does not consciously fib. It is simply that her sense of expediency has completely got the better of her. Truthful, she undoubtedly is not, but I have always believed in her sincerity. And we were all secretly grateful to her for restoring Claire’s good humor.
“I may not have a staff of A. D. C’s., but I have had quite as much experience in entertaining as Lady Annabel Bending, I imagine,” said Claire, with some elasticity of statement. “And I should like to do something of the kind.”
“The difficulty will be to get men,” Mrs. Kendal stated, with all the Kendal directness. “You know how few men there are anywhere near Cross Loman. The girls often say that it’s next door to impossible to get a man for anything round here. Of course, Ahlfred would come down for it, and perhaps he could bring a friend—that would be two men.”
We tried to look encouraged.
“Let’s make a list of the people you want to invite, Cousin Claire.”
Claire dictated names, and Sallie wrote them down, and we all made suggestions. The monosyllable “men” must have resounded through the hall fifty times, in Mumma’s emphatic contralto.