The Camp Fire Girls Go Motoring; Or, Along the Road That Leads the Way

by Hildegard G. Frey

I suppose Carrie must have told her mistress of our presence, for after one of her absences from the room she said that Mrs. McClure had said we were welcome to stay all night if we wished. We looked at each other with rather comical expressions. To our widely varying list of night's lodgings there was about to be added one more, as different from the rest as they had been from each other. One more adventure was to be added to our already long list! But even then we did not guess that this one was to surpass all the others as the glare of a rocket outshines the glimmer of a match!

Carrie returned again presently and after looking at Agnes steadily for a minute, with a peculiar expression in her black eyes she turned to Nyoda and said respectfully that Mrs. McClure was giving a fancy dress ball that night and, as several of the invited guests had been prevented from coming at the last moment, which would spoil the number for a certain march figure she had planned, she wanted to know if we would mind attending the ball in their places. She begged us to excuse her for not coming in to speak to us herself, but she was in the hands of her hair-dresser.

Would we mind attending the ball! Did things ever happen to other people the way they happened to us? And such a ball as the McClures would give would be like a page out of the Arabian Nights to us, who knew nothing of high society.

"But what could we wear?" asked Sahwah, always the first to come to earth and see the practical side of the question.

Carrie flashed her a sparkling look from her black eyes, giggled, and then shifted her gaze to Agnes, whom she watched narrowly. Agnes looked indifferent, both at her and at us. The stony expression on Agnes's face began to puzzle me; I wondered if there was any mystery about her. Carrie finally took her eyes from Agnes's face and allowed them to travel around the room to where our touring suits hung up to dry. "The automobile suits," she suggested respectfully, "and the veils, and the goggles—You could masque as a party of tourists. The clothes are quite dry."

Our spirits revived again, for the thought that we might have to miss this grand opportunity of witnessing a gorgeous spectacle because we had nothing to wear had sent our hearts down into our shoes.

Carrie was summoned away then by a soft purring little buzzer and directed Agnes to help us dress. I must say that we made very nice looking tourists in our tan suits and green veils. Agnes had the suits pressed until there were no wrinkles left in them and arranged our veils with a practised hand. All the while we were dressing we could hear automobiles driving up under the porte-cochere, and guests arriving, and we were in a fever of anticipation. Strains of music floated up from below, together with the subdued hum of many voices. We judged from the direction of the sounds that the ballroom was on the first floor.

It was after ten o'clock when we were finally ready and Carrie appeared in the door for us. She took us down another stairway into a vast hall filled with paintings and statuary, where a man in a dark blue suit and silver braid (I suppose that's what you'd call a footman in livery), stood stiffly as the statues around him. Carrie said something to him in a low tone (I presume she was explaining our presence without cards of invitation, such as he was collecting from the other guests), and he looked at us with an impassive eye and nodded his head. He was a very homely man with an exceedingly red nose with one bright blue vein running across it that gave him somewhat of a singular appearance. I remember thinking that if I were his mistress I should set him to working in the garden where nobody could see him, instead of posting him in the front hall to admit the guests.

After Carrie had turned us over to the Nose with the Vein she went up-stairs again and the man slid back a door on the left side of the hall. We found ourselves in the ballroom and in the midst of a scene as bewildering as it was gorgeous. Of course, our first thought had been to find our hostess and make ourselves known, but there was no way of telling which one Mrs. McClure was. Everybody was masked and frolicking around and there didn't seem to be anyone doing the duty of a hostess whom we could suspect of being Mrs. McClure. Later on we discovered that there was a reception-room off at the other end of the ballroom where Mrs. McClure had been receiving her guests, but at the time we saw nothing but the shifting masses of light and color around us, that resolved themselves into kings and queens and princes and Indians and turbaned Hindoos and pirates and Turks and peasants and fairies. The orchestra was playing the opening bars of a waltz and the dancers were seeking partners. We withdrew into a corner behind a large palm to look on. To our surprise and somewhat to our embarrassment we were asked to dance before the waltz was over. My partner was a Scottish highlander and a good dancer, and he evidently thought I belonged in the set who were the guests at this ball, because he kept pointing out different people and asking if I thought they were this one or that one. I did not speak much, however, and do not think he ever guessed that I was not a friend of Mrs. McClure's, was an outsider at the ball, and was, in fact, the mere tourist I was supposed to represent. I thought, however, I might get one piece of information out of him.

"I don't see Mrs. McClure," I said, looking over the dancing couples. Then it was that the Highlander told me about the reception-room at the other side of the conservatory that opened out of the ballroom, where Mrs. McClure was. I mentally thanked him for this piece of information and purposed to tell Nyoda about it as soon as the dance was over. But when that dance came to a close we were claimed by other partners for the next, and so on, and we did not get out of the ballroom.