“I’ll come down here in a cab and pick you up, and we’ll go to the wharf together. It’s ’way over somewhere,” he waved vaguely.
After they had shaken hands the amazing customer hurried off. His whole being seemed to exude a fierce yet always benevolent energy—the most amazing customer who had ever come into the store. “I’ll be able to tell Stella something’s happened at Oaks-Ferguson’s today!” he mused; and then he remembered that she’d no longer be interested to know whether things happened there or didn’t.
The look of animation faded wanly, and he felt very much alone. “Maybe I’ll go over anyway and see if she’s ready to make it up,” he thought, as he stood there in the doorway beside a swinging shiny oilskin coat and hat, gazing out into the murk of the dying winter day. But another voice within him followed close: “Maybe I won’t, too—anyway not yet awhile.” The first was the voice of the heart, hungry for the return of a girl’s affection; but the second was the voice of a still squirming masculine ego.
However, could he have known that at this very moment Stella was receiving from the postman an invitation, after all, to Elsa’s dance, and could he have beheld the look of rapture that came into her face as she realized the good fortune which had befallen her, Jerome would have experienced greater difficulty than ever persuading himself that she was going to be the heavier loser of the two.
CHAPTER THREE
FATE BEGINS TO PLAY HER CARDS
I
At eleven o’clock the ballroom was crowded. Elsa Utterbourne, in a handsome, severe, somehow almost boyish gown, was the centre of interest, and about her revolved giddily the established dances of the year—a year when all that was most outré was also most popular.
Young interests and enthusiasms and hopes and despairs and infatuations and intrigues merged and were stirred into a gay musical shuffle. All the season’s debutantes were there and a great many of last season’s debutantes; all the important marriageable young ladies, in fact, and a few of the important unmarriageable older young ladies, and a great many young married folks, with their air of unimpeachable savoir-faire and often an inclination to be as scandalous as possible without quite incurring the frown of the community; even a sprinkling of blithe young divorcées, since connubial life can’t be expected to be a grand sweet song in every single instance, and how can you always tell until you’ve tried it whether married life with one mate will prove as nice as married life with another mate—or in extreme cases, a state of unmarried life with somebody else’s? In a word, the dance was an entire success.