"Rolly never spoons, anyhow," announced Eva Darling, whose blue eyes, however, were languishing toward the table. "But it makes him unhappy to think he can't burst in on somebody——"
"Hold your tongue, Evy. You don't know what you're talking about. Because I'm quite insensible to your charms, don't fool yourself that I'm an anchorite. I merely prefer brunettes."
"Come, come, children!" Mr. Dinwiddie was rubbing his hands at the end of the table covered with blue china and mounds of home-made cake. "Stop quarrelling and sit down. Anywhere. No ceremony here."
Some of the guests were in their seats. The others fairly swooped into theirs, entirely regardless of anything so uneatable as neighbors. Mrs. Larsing, a tall, red-haired, raw-boned New England woman, had entered, bearing an enormous platter of fried trout, fresh from the lake. Larsing, burnt almost as dark as an Indian, followed with a plate of potatoes boiled in their jackets balanced on one hand, and a small mountain of johnny cake on the other. He returned in a moment with two large platters of sliced ham and cold boiled beef, and the guests were left to wait on themselves.
The dinner was the gayest Mary had ever attended, for even the Sophisticates, however lively, preserved a certain formality in town; when she was present, at all events. Rollo Todd, broke into periodical war whoops, to Mr. Dinwiddie's manifest delight. The others burst into song, while waiting for the travelling platters. Eva Darling got up twice and danced by herself, her pale bobbed head and little white face eerily suspended in the dark shadows of the great room. Other feet moved irresistibly under the table. Good stories multiplied, and they laughed uncontrollably at the worst of the jokes.
They drank little, for the supply was limited, but the altitude was four thousand feet and the thin light air went to their heads. They were New Yorkers suddenly snatched from the most feverish pitch of modern civilization, but no less primitive in soul than woodsmen who had never seen a city, and the men would have liked to put on war paint and run through the forest with tomahawks.
Todd, when the dinner was over, did seize a tomahawk from the wall, drape himself in an Indian blanket, and march up and down the room roaring out terrific battle-cries. Three minutes later, Minor and Bolton had followed his example, and marched solemnly behind him, brandishing their weapons and making unearthly noises. Mary, from her chair by the hearth, watched them curiously. At first it was merely the exuberant spirits of their release and the unaccustomed altitude that inspired them, but their countenances grew more and more sombre, their eyes wilder, their voices more war-like. They were no longer doing a stunt, they were atavistic. Their voices reverberated across the lake.
One by one the other men had joined them, until even Mr. Dinwiddie was in the procession, marching with loud stamping feet round and round the big room. The cries became shorter, menacing, abrupt, imperative. The high lamps cast strange shadows on their lost faces. The voices grew hoarse, dropped to low growls, their faces changed from ferocity to a mournful solemnity until they looked even more like primal men than before; but they continued their marching and stamping until Gora, who, with the other women, had begun to fear that the rhythm would bring down the house, had the inspiration to insert a Caruso disk into the victrola; and as those immortal notes flung themselves imperiously across that wild scene, the primitive in the men dropped like a leaden plummet, and they threw themselves on the floor by the fire. But they smoked their pipes in silence. They had had something that no woman could give them nor share, and there was an ungallant wish in every manly heart that they had left the women at home.
Caruso was succeeded by Emma Eames, and the great lost diva by Farrar and Scotti. Then, the concert over, a yawning party stumbled upstairs to bed and not a sound was heard from them until the first bell rang at seven o'clock next morning.