“Wait a little and see;” Burnham tried to make his tone impartial, if not skeptical; “you’ve only begun yet. Don’t expect the habits of months and years, the loose customs and low tastes, are going to be overthrown in a single night. The affair of last night, for instance, was doubtless the most orderly entertainment and the quietest dance they ever had. But it don’t follow that they will all of them be satisfied to drop entirely the old order of low dances when they had plenty to drink, even if they didn’t have salads and coffee, or ice-cream and cake. There’s no telling how many of them will be stealing off to those places before winter is over.”
“Then we must get up some form of entertainment that will hold them to us,” said Salome firmly. “They sha’n’t fall back, if anything we can compass can save them.”
Villard looked across his big ledger at her, as if she had been an angel sent from Heaven direct, to preach a higher political economy to the cotton factories of earth. She caught his look and smiled back at him; but she said no more.
She did not speak to him until just as she was ready to go home.
“How do you like your new quarters, Mr. Villard?” she said, then. “I hope you rested well last night?”
Villard remembered his sleepless hours vaguely, as in a dream. She looked so bright and untroubled herself.
“You deserted me after that first dance. Did I dance so badly that you feared or dreaded to be caught by me again? If it hadn’t been for Mr. Burnham and Mr. Fales I should have felt quite a wall-flower.”
“You never could be that, Miss Shepard,” poor Villard managed to say.
“Well, as soon as the young people get moved in we must start some classes. I know a good dressmaker whom I can get, and Marion will teach them some other things, if they want it.”
She lingered some minutes, talking over the Hall and her plans, and left him with a confused image of herself mixing up with the figures of the ledger in a most incongruous way. Alas! John Villard was to have many a hard fight with himself before he could drive away that image at will.