Chapter Seven
Lewis was pledged to return to Green Doors at ten o’clock that evening. Cynthia and Harry, Clare was aware, had made plans which would keep their cherished guest occupied for all of Sunday, and he could not come then. This was the only time left. She had made the rendezvous under cover of walking up to the house with Lewis when he was leaving Green Doors this afternoon. He was to let himself in by the wicket gate and she would meet him on the terrace, for Petra was not to know that he had come back. Dick had explained her scheme to him, had he not?
Yes, Dick had explained, and while at the time of the explanation Lewis had had no intention of collaborating with Mrs. Farwell in any schemes whatever, now he agreed to return for a “talk.” Anything that touched Petra’s existence would have drawn him irresistibly back.
The great hall was wide open onto the terrace tonight, as it had been this afternoon. It made an excellent ballroom. It was a small party and every one was inside, dancing. At least, as Lewis came up onto it, the terrace seemed deserted.
His eyes found Petra first of all. She was dancing with a tall, dark youth, over a restricted area in the center of the floor. Lewis saw that the other girls were like flowers in the black-coated arms of their partners—scarlet flowers, blue, yellow, exotically scented. Or was the perfume from the flowers on the terrace? In any case, it harmonized with the exotic music. But the girls themselves seemed too fragile for the voluptuous implications of the perfume and the music. They were flowers drifting on the dark current of sensuousness with petals not yet sodden.
Lewis was amused at himself over his fancifulness but it continued to spin itself along. If the girls there were flowers, the boys were leaves. And the leaves, no more than the flowers, belonged to the dark current under the music; they were merely eddying over its surface, vacant and bemused. It was strangely unreal, unconvincing—both the would-be savage music and the would-be voluptuous dancing.
But Petra was different. His eyes came back to her. She was not bemused and she was too alive to drift. So her dancing was out of key and came near to awkwardness. Given solid earth, she could run fleetly, beautifully, Lewis was certain,—a Diana, spirit and body one. But she was too alive and too vital to find herself in this syncopated dalliance with a shadow world of sensuousness. Passion, for her to recognize it, must be bright, whole, burning with sun. Lewis was not amused now at his thought. He knew what he knew about Petra, and his heart offered up a gratitude that was religious in the knowing.
Clare stole up and stood beside him. She had been watching for his arrival, sitting with Dick in the shadow of a tall flower-grown urn. She had sent the young man back to the party peremptorily and with some excitement the instant the older and more eminent visitor appeared.
“Aren’t they precious!” she exclaimed, her fingers just touching Lewis’ arm. “All of them! But my Petra in particular? In that frosty gown!—Come to the library. We can’t talk against this racket. Lowell’s in town speaking to a meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, otherwise he would be hiding in the library himself. He detests jazz. Except when your brother-in-law plays it. Harry’s jazz is superb. He makes it art!”