She was seeing rather more than she had expected of her protégé. In Louisville there is a certain catholicity in the matter of big entertainments. That portion of the population which possesses the inborn or acquired right to call itself "Society" is not large enough to supply a sufficient number of dancing-men to sustain the true belle's boast that she never dances more than once around a ballroom with the same partner. Indeed, in the matter of belles themselves there is a certain catholicity. Every pretty girl who grows up in the old town with any pretentious to grammar and respectability and polite behavior has one chance in her lifetime to foot it with the best. She may, if she so wishes, enroll herself among the season's débutantes.
If her family can afford a certain amount of entertaining to support this pretention, well and good. If not, she must manage as best she can with the friendly aid of the society column—no small power in the land. Let the would-be débutante but supply herself with presentable dancing frocks and slippers, and Louisville will do the rest.—For one season. During that brief time, however, she must make good her footing by means of matrimony or otherwise, or back to the chimney-corner for her, like Cinderella when the cock crew. The town is full of disappointed little Cinderellas, comforting themselves with good works or a humble domesticity, dreaming who knows what dreams of the Might-Have-Been.
They do not all return to the chimney-corner, however. Sometimes they stay. Sometimes they fare forth joyously into a larger world, and their names lend luster to greater events than are chronicled in our society column. One, at least, trails gracefully through ducal halls, and the strawberry leaves are almost as becoming to her pretty hair as the rose she wore to her first Galt House ball.—Perhaps Louisville, with a reputation to sustain, is wise to give her unknown Cinderellas the benefit of the doubt.
The male Cinderellas, if they are not welcomed with quite the same interest, are at least not as soon thrust back into the limbo of things forgotten. Once their names appear in the list of presentable dancers, they may arrive year after year at the larger balls, eat, drink and make merry, select such partners as please them, and retire into their lairs again until the next entertainment, with no further obligation on their part than perhaps a perfunctory handshaking with their host and hostess. Not even that, if modesty forbids. Nor need anything bar the gates to them except age, conspicuous behavior, or the lack of a long-tailed coat.
Archibald Blair presently got used to the surprise of receiving frequently in his mail engraved invitations from people who did not know him, and began to look upon them as a special dispensation on the part of Providence to favor his pursuit of Miss Joan Darcy.—If anything so entirely self-effacing could be called a pursuit! His wish was merely to see her whenever possible, to listen to her whenever possible, and if absolutely necessary to talk to her till somebody more worthy came to take his place. And having made, a week apart, his two party-calls as suggested by her inexplicable but obliging step-mother, he would have been at a loss as to how to manage further encounters if it had not been for the assistance of these providential invitations.
Archie also, being quick to take a hint, made prompt party-calls on the providers of the invitations, a fact which set him apart among dancing men; so that presently he began to see Joan not only at large balls but at smaller buffet suppers and the like, even at theater parties, when a hostess's need was desperate. All of which surprised Joan far more than it surprised him. He accepted the whole thing as a miracle, part of the incredible good luck which had begun to happen to him when he landed his first big order in Philadelphia, and got on to the train for home to find the One and Only sitting in the chair behind him.
"Whoops, my dear! I've got 'em locoed," said grateful Archie to himself; referring presumably to the Fates.
CHAPTER XXV
His luck did not confine itself to social matters. One day the president of the firm, a Mr. Moore, greatly admired in the office because of his hauteur with employees, sent for Archie for no apparent reason except to chat about life in general and business in particular. Now business was a thing which Archibald enjoyed as some men enjoy golf. Getting about among all sorts of people, making them like you whether they wanted to or not, persuading them that the varnish or glue or wax or what-not you happened to be selling was just a little better than any other on the market (which Archie certainly believed it was), overcoming the natural reluctance of human nature to try anything with which it is not familiar, and finally retiring with a fat little order in his vest-pocket—all this was as exciting to young Blair as the hazard of the highway may have been to earlier Knights of the Road. With the additional advantage of being honest. Archie always preferred, when it was possible, to be honest. So that he had a good deal to say to Mr. Moore.