"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine affectation of austere hostess-ship. "I say you are to come down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will come."
"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.
It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side; easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the social sense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.
For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself—and any lingering trace of self-consciousness—in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there could be no possible Wahaskan demand.
"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of you"—piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and you needn't meet any more people than you want to."
When she had patted the pillows into place and was gone to welcome still later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste—on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste. Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward to something suggesting a cross between a neighborhood tea-drinking and a church social. He was agreeably disappointed to find that the keynote was distinctly well-mannered, passably urban, undeniably conventional.
And the charming young hostess.... From his corner of the window-seat Griswold had a comprehensive view of the two great rooms, and beyond them through a pillared opening to the candle-lighted dining-room where the refreshments were served. Though the rooms were well filled, there was but a single personality pervading them for the eager student of types. Admitting that there were other women more beautiful, Griswold, groping always for the fitting figure and the apt phrase, told himself that Miss Grierson's crowning gift was an acute sense of the eternal harmonies; she was always "in character."
Hitherto he had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the later charm might be subtly sensuous—he refused to analyze it too closely—it was undeniable that it warmed him to a newer and a stronger life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide. True, Miss Grierson bore little resemblance to any ideal of his past imaginings. She might even be the Aspasia to Charlotte Farnham's Saint Cecilia. But even so, was not the daughter of Axiochus well beloved of men and of heroes?
It was some little time afterward, and Jasper Grierson, stalking like a grim and rather unwilling master of ceremonies among his guests, had gruffly introduced three or four of the men, when Griswold gladly made room in the window-seat for his transformed and glorified mistress of the fitnesses. As had happened more than once before, her nearness intoxicated him; and while he made sure now that the charm was at least partly physical, its appeal was none the less irresistible.
"Are you dreadfully tired?" she asked; adding quickly: "You mustn't let us make a martyr of you. It's your privilege to disappear whenever you feel like it."