With the Procession

by Henry Blake Fuller

In the midst of the ceremonial Truesdale sauntered in and passed through the rooms with a graceful indifference; he was the last to be disconcerted by an assemblage purely feminine. He had doffed for the hour most of his imported eccentricities in the way of dress, and had consented to appear, properly enough, in a double-breasted black frock-coat with extremely long skirts. He had an orchid in his button-hole—a large one, very vivid and flamboyant. Jane had looked, rather, for a chrysanthemum—one of those immeasurable blooms worn by the young men in Life. "But Dick will be individual," she acknowledged. "Thank goodness it wasn't a peony, or worse. He does look nice, if he is my brother; and he's the only young man I know with violet eyes."

Truesdale drifted into the tea-room, and Jane presently saw him lounging in a chair alongside Bertie Patterson. The table was officered after the fashion that Mrs. Bates had suggested—by Mrs. Belden, who, in the absence of her own daughter, kept away by illness, had brought, instead, another girl, her daughter's friend, a visitor from New York. Truesdale failed to catch her name.

Mrs. Belden herself was somewhat large and inclined to be a bit high-colored and full-blown. An excess of blond down lined her cheeks just below and before her ears, and her light-colored eyebrows spread themselves rather broadly and dispersedly on her forehead. A superfluity of straw-colored hair, of a shade essentially improbable waved about her ears and temples, and a high gold comb emphasized the loose knot into which it was drawn behind. "She would do better on the stage," Truesdale said to himself; "she has gotten herself up for the photographer. And if all those rings are her own, she has more than any one woman needs."

The girl with her, whose name presently came to him as Gladys—"Gladys what?" he wondered—let herself loose on him at once with a fusillade of ready familiarities. The field was clear, for Bertie Patterson, at his side, had few words to interpose. Her large brown eyes rested half appealingly upon him in the intervals of her constrained and halting little service, and he readily divined the poor child as in a lonely and uncomfortable minority.

"To-day is only my second time," she said to him, with a kind of appealing protest; "you mustn't watch me and criticise me." She had just finished her ministrations on a pair of old-time family friends whom Rosy, in the fulness of her social efflorescence, had banished for consolation and reassurance to the tea-room. Somehow, the guests that had fallen to her side of the table had all been of this character. "When was the first?"

"Why, don't you know? The day you—you—"

"Oh, that day!" laughed Truesdale. "I didn't know you were there, of course. You must have thought me absurd."

"No; not—not—absurd. But on such a long, wide street, with so many handsome houses all around—"

Truesdale smiled. "Poor little thing! I believe she admires Michigan Avenue; I believe she's impressed by it." To him this thoroughfare was not completely innocent of the cheap and vulgar restlessness which is the dominant note of all American street architecture. "But let her admire it, if she can. Think what I expected to find Piccadilly!"

"I enjoy driving down it so much," she continued, confidentially, yet with a shy little look as if trying to learn whether her confidence was misplaced. "Aunt Lydia and I go shopping almost every day."