CHAPTER X
Judith Scores Again
The house party at Buck Hill was not proving the great success that Mildred and Nan had hoped for. All of the elements of pleasure and gaiety were present but to the anxious hostesses the affair seemed to drag somewhat. In the first place, brother Jeff utterly refused to fall in love with their prize guest and the prize guest, being accustomed to conquest, was peevish in consequence. Not that Jeff was in the least rude. On the contrary, he was especially polite and charming to all of his sisters’ friends, fetching and carrying for them, dancing with them, playing tennis with the athletic, talking sentimental nothings with the romantic, and gravely discussing the Einstein theory with the high-brows. He did everything that was required of him but fall in love with Jean Roland.
The young people were gathered at one end of the long piazza. At the other end sat Miss Ann Peyton and Mrs. Bucknor. Miss Ann was engaged in her favorite occupation of 112 crocheting thread lamp-mats and Mrs. Bucknor vainly endeavoring to get to the bottom of the family stocking basket. The forenoon is always a difficult period in which to entertain a house party. It seems almost impossible to start anything, at least so Mildred and Nan felt. Even the most frivolously inclined do not want to flirt in the morning.
Everybody was feeling a little dull, perhaps from having eaten more breakfast than is usual in this day and generation, but Buck Hill held to the custom of olden times of much and varied food with which to start the day. One can’t be very lively after shad roe, liver and bacon, hot rolls and corn cakes all piled on top of strawberries and cream, and the whole washed down with coffee.
Jean Roland smothered a yawn, a deliberate yawn—not the kind you can’t repress because the air is close and you feel like a goldfish when the water in the bowl has not been changed and you must gape for breath. The fat boy had been dancing attendance on her for the last hour and she was wearied with his witty sallies. Jeff and Willis Truman, a former classmate, had started a game of bridge with two of the more serious-minded girls.
“Bridge is one of the things I can’t play,” 113 Jean had announced, and it was hardly complimentary that the game was being played in spite of her.
“By the way, Jeff, you know the Titian-haired queen you were so taken up with at the station last evening that you couldn’t greet your guests?” asked Tom Harbison. “I saw her again this morning.”
“That little country person!” exclaimed Jean Roland. “No style at all to her.”