I am aware that my dancing is that of ten years ago, which places it in the same scrap-heap class as a battleship of that date, but Miss McRory told me that she preferred it, and that it exactly suited her step. It would be as easy to describe the way of a bird in the air as to define Miss McRory's step; scrap-heap or no, it made me feel that I walked the carpet like a thing of life. We were occasionally wrecked upon reefs of huddled furniture, and we sustained a collision or two of first-rate magnitude: after these episodes my partner imperceptibly steered me to a corner, in which I leaned heavily against whatever was most stable, and tried to ignore the fact that the floor was rocking and the walls were waving, and that it was at least two years since I had exceeded in this way.
It was in one of these intervals that Miss McRory told me that she was going hunting next day, and that he—her long hazel-grey eyes indicated Mr. Irving, now slowly and showily moving a partner about the room—had got a horse for her to ride, and she had never hunted before. She hoped to goodness she wouldn't fall off, and (here she dealt me the fraction of a glance) she hoped I'd pick her up now and again. I said that the two wishes were incompatible, to which she replied that she didn't know what incompatible meant; and I told her to ask Mr. Irving whether he had found that salt and champagne were compatible.
"I thought you only wore that old eyeglass for show," replied Miss McRory softly, and again looked up at me from under her upcurled Irish eyelashes; "it was out of spite he drank it! A girl did that to my brother Curly at a dance, and he poured it down her back."
"I think Mr. Irving treated you better than you deserved," I replied paternally, adventuring once more into the tide of dancers.
When, some five minutes afterwards, I resigned my partner to Irving D.I., I felt that honour had been satisfied, and that it was now possible to leave the revel. But in this I found that I had reckoned, not so much without my host, as without my fellow-guest. Philippa, to my just indignation, had blossomed into the success of the evening. Having disposed of the kind-hearted gentleman (with the pink cheeks and the black moustache), she was immediately claimed by Mr. De Lacey McRory, the eldest son of the house, and with him exhibited a proficiency in the latest variant of the waltz that she had hitherto concealed from me. The music, like the unseen orchestra of a merry-go-round, was practically continuous. Scuffles took place at intervals behind the upright piano, during which music-books fell heavily upon the keys, and one gathered that a change of artist was taking place, but the fundamental banging of the bass was maintained, and the dancing ceased not. The efforts of the musicians were presently reinforced by a young lady in blue, who supplied a shrill and gibbering obligato upon a beribboned mandoline, and even, at some passionate moments, added her voice to the ensemble.
"Will this go on much longer?" I asked of Miss Bennett, with whom I had withdrawn to the asylum of a bow window.
"D'ye mean Miss Cooney O'Rattigan and her mandoline?" replied Miss Bennett. "I can tell you it was twice worse this afternoon when she was singing Italian to it. I never stayed here before, and please goodness I never will again; the wardrobe in my room is crammed with Mrs. McRory's summer clothes, and the chest of drawers is full of apples! Ah, but after all," went on Miss Bennett largely, "what can you expect from a cob but a kick? Didn't Tomsy Flood find a collection of empty soda-water bottles in his bed the time he stayed here for the wedding, when you found him stitched up in the feather bed!"
