“Why didn’t you come down earlier, Mr. Longacre? We should have given you a run for your money.”
“Oh, there’ll be another night like this for me,” said Longacre, with confidence.
Mrs. Budd looked at him with dim dismay, but the entrance of Charlie Thair diverted her. Lean, keen, and smiling, his unusually animated, not to say joyous, bearing gave her reassurance. Her eyes traveled to Julia for confirmation, but Julia was disconcertingly oblivious of Thair’s presence. Her vivid gestures and high animation were all for Longacre. Mrs. Budd’s forehead showed a cleft of anxiety not to be erased by her most scrupulous smiles. Among the groups, dispersing to dress for dinner, she tried to reach her daughter; but the girl had been swept up-stairs, the center of a knot of women. The slow-moving Holden detained Mrs. Budd until she had left hardly that allotted time in which the most expeditious woman can be groomed and gowned.
But Mrs. Budd was superior to time in point of determination. She hurried her maid to the woman’s distraction, and half an hour before the first of her guests could be expected she knocked at her daughter’s door.
Julia was in a white and crimson combing-gown, with her hair streaming; but she had not yet removed her wet riding-boots, and there was, to Mrs. Budd’s eye, something distressingly indiscreet in such foot-gear appearing from the folds of a peignoir.
“Oh, Julia dear!” she remonstrated.
Julia laughed, and offered a spurred heel to the maid. “I can’t bear to take them off,” she said.
“You did have a nice time, didn’t you, pettie, in spite of the dripping fog and the dreadful wind! But I should have been anxious if you had been with any one but Charlie Thair. You did have a nice time, didn’t you?”
“Magnificent! Uproarious!”
“Oh, not uproarious!” her mother protested.