Finally the evening came and everything was ready. Fong's talents, after years of disuse, rose in the passion of the artist and produced a feast worthy of the past. A florist decorated the table and the lower floor. Mother's jewels were taken out of the safety deposit box, and Lorry and Chrystie, in French costumes with their hair dressed so that they looked like strangers, gazed upon each other in the embowered drawing-room realizing that they had brought it upon themselves and must see it through.
The start was far from promising; none of them seemed able to live up to it. Aunt Ellen kept following the strange waiters with suspicious eyes, then looking down the glittering table at Lorry like a worried dog. And Chrystie, who had been all blithe expectation up to the time she dressed, was suddenly shattered by nervousness, making detached, breathless remarks about the weather and then drinking copious draughts of water. As for Lorry, she felt herself so small and shriveled that her new dress hung on her in folds and her mouth was so dry she could hardly articulate.
It was awful. The guests seemed to feel the blight and wither under it, eating carefully as if fearing sounds of mastication might intrude on the long, recurring silences. There was a time when Lorry thought she couldn't bear it, had a distracted temptation to leap to her feet, say she was faint and rush from the place. Then came the turn in the tide—Mr. Mayer, the strange man Mrs. Kirkham had produced, did it. She had noticed that he alone seemed free from the prevailing discomfort, looked undisturbed and calm, glancing at the table, the guests, herself and Chrystie. But it was not until the fish that he started to talk. It was about the fish, but it branched away from the fish, radiated out from it to other fish, to the waters where the other fish swam, to the countries that gave on the waters, to the people who lived in the countries.
He woke them all up, held them entranced. Lorry couldn't be sure whether he really was so clever or seemed so by contrast with them, but she thought it was the latter. It didn't matter; nothing mattered except that he was making it go. And at first she had been loath to ask him! She hadn't liked him, thought he was too suavely elaborate, a sort of overdone imitation. Well, thank goodness she had, for he simply took the dinner which was settling down to a slow, sure death and made it come to life.
Presently they were all talking, to their partners, across the table, even to Aunt Ellen. The exhilarating sound of voices rose to a hum, then a concerted babble broken by laughter. It grew animated, it grew sparkling, it grew brilliant. Chrystie, with parted lips and glistening eyes, became as artlessly amusing as she was in the bosom of her family. She was delightful, her frank enjoyment a charming spectacle. Lorry, in that seat which so short a time before had seemed but one remove from the electric chair, now reigned as from a throne, proudly surveying the splendors of her table and the gladness of her guests.
When it was over, the last carriage wheels rumbling down the street, the girls stood in the hall and looked at one another. Aunt Ellen, creaking in her new silks, toiled up the stairs, an old, shaky hand on the balustrade.
"Come up, girls," she quavered; "you must be dead tired."
"Well," breathed Lorry with questioning eyes on her sister, "how was it?"
Chrystie jumped at her and folded her in a rapturous embrace.
"Oh, it was maddening, blissful, rip-roarious! Oh, Lorry, it was the grandest thing since the water came up to Montgomery street!"