“I can see you now, as I refuse to carry the subject further at this session. You stiffen in your chair, your eyes, which have seemed so carelessly indifferent, suddenly glow, and snap, and sparkle, and flash. The tiny red spots have deepened, enhancing the velvet of your cheeks. Your red lips curl. You impatiently touch back the waves of your rippling brown hair with your slender white hand, which turns so gracefully upon its wrist. You blaze straight into my eyes, and tell me that I have taken this means of avoiding the discussion, because I perceive in advance that I am beaten.
“Miss Sargent, I do not tell you that you are unfair and ungenerous to seize upon this advantage; instead, I bite my lip, and compel my countenance to befitting gravity, knowing that I should be above the petty emotions of anger, impatience, and offended pride; but humbly confessing, to myself, that I have not my nature under such perfect subjection as I should like to have.
“Consequently, I beg you to defer this step in our logical deduction to another night, and turn, with grateful relief, to the music. I need not say how heartily I wish that you were here to sing with me.
“Yours earnestly,
“Smith Boyd.”
Gail shrieked when she first read that letter, then she read it again and blushed. She had, as she came upon his initial flat statement of denial, felt a flush in her cheeks and a snap in her eyes. She had, as she read, stiffened with indignation, and relaxed in scornful disdain, and flashed with hot retort, in advance of his discernment that she would do so! She was flamingly vexed with him! On the third reading her eyes twinkled, and her red lips curved deliciously with humour, as she admired the cleverness which she had previously only recognised. In subsequent readings this was her continued attitude, and she kept the letter somewhere in the neighbourhood where she might touch it occasionally, because of the keen mental appreciation she had for it. Were her eyes really capable of such an infinite variety of expression as he had suggested? She looked in the glass to see; but was disappointed. They were merely large, and brown, and deep, and, just now, rather softened.
There was an impromptu party at Gail’s house, a jolly affair, indeed. All her old, steadfast friends, you know, who were quite sufficient to fill her life; and this was the night of the gay little Mrs. Babbitt’s affair in New York. How much better than those great, glittering, social pageants was a simple, wholesome little ball like this, with all her dear girl chums, in their pretty little Paris model frocks, and all the boys, in their shiny white fronts. No one had changed, not even impulsive Howard Clemmens. Poor Howard! He knew now that his refusal was permanent and enduring, yet he came right to the front with his same assumption of proprietorship. She let him do it. You see, in all these years, the boys had tacitly admitted that Howard “had the inside track”; so, while they all admired and loved her, they stepped aside and permitted him to monopolise her. Back home there was a sort of esprit de corps like that, though it was sometimes hard on the girl. When Gail had flown home from the cruel world to the sheltering arms of her mother and her friends, she had firmly planned to set Howard in his proper place as a formal friend, and thereafter be free. There were quite a number of the boys who had, at one time or another, seemed quite worth cultivation. When she came to meet them again, however, with that same old brotherly love shining in their eyes, she somehow found that she did not care to be free. Anyhow, it would humiliate Howard to reduce him so publicly to the ranks, snip off his buttons and take his sabre, as it were; so she allowed him to clank his spurs, to the joy and delight of Arly.
This was the gayest party of which Gail had been the bright particular ornament since her return, and she quite felt, except for the presence of Arly, that she had fallen back into her old familiar life. Why, it seemed as if she had been home for ages and ages! There was the same old dance music, the Knippel orchestra, with the wonderfully gifted fat violinist, and the pallid pianist with the long hair, who had four children, and the ’cellist who scowled so dreadfully but played the deep passages so superbly, and clarinettist, whom every one thought should have gone in for concert work, and the grey-haired old basso player, who never looked up and who never moved a muscle except those in his arms, one up and down and the other crosswise; there was a new second violinist, a black-browed man who looked as if he had been disappointed in life, but second violinists always do.
At the end of the Sargent ballroom, where Gail’s sedate but hospitable mother always sat until the “Home, Sweet Home” dance was ended, were the same dear, familiar palms, which Marty, the florist, always sent to everybody’s house to augment the home collection. The gorgeous big one had a leaf gone, but it was sprouting two others.
Tremendously gay affair. Everybody was delighted, and said so; and they laughed and danced and strolled and ate ices, and said jolly nothings, and knew, justifiably, that they were nice, and clever, and happy young people; and Arly Fosland, with any number of young men wondering how old her husband was, danced conscientiously, and smiled immediately when any one looked at her. Gail also was dancing conscientiously, and having a perfectly happy evening. At about this hour there would be something near four hundred people in the ballroom, and the drawing-rooms, and the conservatory of Mrs. Babbitt’s.