Daylight was still streaming in from the West as they took their seats at the table in the dingily furnished room. Mrs. Dale gave a little shudder as she glanced from the “furnished house” knives to the commonplace dinner service.
“Ah!” she said, “it is not like this that I used to entertain my friends. My little dinners had quite a reputation—once!”
Then, as if she felt that these regrets were worse than vain, she turned the subject abruptly, while a spasm of pain for the moment convulsed her face.
Rudolph on his side was sorry she had mentioned the “little dinners.” They suggested a past life in which there had been something more than frivolity; something with which he would have dissociated Mrs. Dale if he could. But innocent Mabin, wishing to say something, brought the conversation back to the point it had left.
“But why can’t you have pretty dinners now, if you like to?”
Mrs. Dale’s fair face grew whiter as she answered gently:
“I will tell you—presently—some day—why I don’t have anything pretty or nice about me now.”
And Mabin, feeling that she had touched a painful chord, became more silent than ever.
Perhaps it was her sudden subsidence into absolute gloom which caused the other two to make a great effort to restore something like animation to the talk. And being both young, and of naturally high spirits, they succeeded so well that before the meal which had begun so solemnly was over, Mrs. Dale and Rudolph were talking and laughing as if there had never been a shadow upon either of their lives. At first they made brave attempts to drag Mabin into the conversation. But as these efforts were in vain, it naturally ended in her being left out of the gayety, and in her sitting entrenched in a gloomy silence of her own.
And when dinner was over, and they all went into the little adjoining room which Mrs. Dale called her “den,” it was quite natural that Mrs. Dale should sit down at the piano, in the good-natured wish to leave the young people to entertain each other; and equally natural that Rudolph, on finding that Mabin had nothing to say to him, and that she was particularly frigid in her manner, should go over to the piano, and by coaxing Mrs. Dale to sing him his favorite songs and then hers, should continue the brisk flirtation begun at the dinner-table.