“It’s you who are heavenly,” he answered with a boy’s laugh. “You are like a feather—and a willow wand.”
“You are light too,” she laughed back, “and you are like steel as well.”
Mrs. Alan Stacy, the lady with the magnificent henna hair, had recently given less time to him, being engaged in the preliminary instruction of a new member of the Infant Class. Such things will, of course, happen and though George had quite ingenuously raged in secret, the circumstances left him free to “hover” and hovering was a pastime he enjoyed.
“Let us go on like this forever and ever,” he said sweeping half the length of the room with her and whirling her as if she were indeed a leaf in the wind, “Forever and ever.”
“I wish we could. But the music will stop,” she gave back.
“Music ought never to stop—never,” he answered.
But the music did stop and when it began again almost immediately another tall, flexible young man made a lightning claim on her and carried her away only to hand her to another and he in his turn to another. She was not allowed more than a moment’s rest and borne on the crest of the wave of young delight, she did not need more. Young eyes were always laughing into hers and elating her by a special look of pleasure in everything she did or said or inspired in themselves. How was she informed without phrases that for this exciting evening she was a creature without a flaw, that the loveliness of her eyes startled those who looked into them, that it was a thrilling experience to dance with her, that somehow she was new and apart and wonderful? No sleek-haired, slim and straight-backed youth said exactly any of these things to her, but somehow they were conveyed and filled her with a wondering realization of the fact that if they were true, they were no longer dreadful and maddening, since they only made people like and want to dance with one. To dance, to like people and be liked seemed so heavenly natural and right—to be only like air and sky and free, happy breathing. There was, it was true, a blissful little uplifted look about her which she herself was not aware of, but which was singularly stimulating to the masculine beholder. It only meant indeed that as she whirled and swayed and swooped laughing she was saying to herself at intervals,
“This is what other girls feel like. They are happy like this. I am laughing and talking to people just as other girls do. I am Robin Gareth-Lawless, but I am enjoying a party like this—a young party.”
Lady Lothwell sitting near her mother watched the trend of affairs with an occasional queer interested smile.
“Well, mamma darling,” she said at last as youth and beauty whirled by in a maelstrom of modern Terpsichorean liveliness, “she is a great success. I don’t know whether it is quite what you intended or not.”