The adventurous lady

by J. C. Snaith

“Just show me how to—won’t you, my dear?” His voice was wonderfully persuasive and fatherly.

Girlie’s knowledge of the fox-trot was almost as vague as my lord’s. But what did that matter? What did anything matter? She rose with a laugh, she intertwined one slender arm with his; slowly she gyrated with this performing bear of a man twice round the drawing room, and then in the wake of the more enterprising couples through the open door and out into the hall.

Mr. Jupp continued to pound the piano. Tango succeeded fox-trot, there was an occasional relapse to the two-step, a brief intermission of some forgotten waltz or other, with now and again, as became a truly modern and progressive mind, a heroic attempt at the jazz. None of the dancers obeyed the music; they didn’t really try to do so; each chose the style that seemed the most natural, so that what began as a half serious performance soon degenerated into an amazing go-as-you-please. But it was highly enjoyable. At any rate, Lord Duckingfield thought it was. A strenuous youth in factory and warehouse had left him no time to pay court to Terpsichore. He knew what he liked, however. And what he did like was to wheel slowly and solemnly round on his left foot, with plenty of elbow room and without having too much ground to cover. And if he was most agreeably assisted in these maneuvers by the charmingly pretty bearer of a distinguished name, why so much the better.

This dainty, gray-eyed little girl quite set the genius of my lord. She was so simple. And with all his riches and his ambitions and his recent nobility, at heart he was really simple himself. After a most exhilarating twenty minutes on the hall parquet, in a space hardly more than six feet square, in the course of which Girlie, with the inimitable tact of her sex, contrived neatly to fit step for step, Lord Duckingfield espied a corner almost perilous in its charm and its seclusion in an angle of the stairs. In point of fact he had had his eye on it from the first. By the time he had truly earned a rest he felt that it would come to him as the just reward of his merit and his virtue.

In the room adjacent, on a piano whose extreme resonance was almost unbearable, Mr. Jupp continued to do surprising things, while his fellow guests, each after his or her manner, kept pace with him as far as was humanly possible. At last, however, Lord Duckingfield came to a sudden halt and drew a series of deep breaths. Then, Girlie upon his arm, he made a bee-line for the palm-shrouded alcove beneath the hall stairs. Kindly providence had decreed that two chairs, of the sort called “comfortable,” should be there already. Girlie, a little breathless too after her altruistic exertions, found herself at rest in one a brief ten seconds before her cavalier came to anchor in the other.

She was feeling entirely reckless. She didn’t care. Her limit had been reached, nay, it had been overstepped. She would drink of the cup. Life was dancing a fiery symbol before her eyes. In spite of the sword that hung by a thread in mid-air she was enjoying her hour. She was enjoying it terribly. If she died of the shame that must follow, at least she would be able to point to an experience beyond the run of women.

“Nice of you, my dear, to help an old duffer like me.” The rich, half chuckling tone of Lord Duckingfield had an odd humility that was wonderfully attractive in the ear of a woman.

“Not at all.” Softly she lisped in true Galsworthian phrase. A powerful genius enfolded her. With a kind of mad dignity she sat up in the wicker chair.

“Oh, but it is, though,” My lord was heavily serious for all that there was a kind of elephantine humor in him. “Not many of you smart young ladies would be bothered with a clumsy old fool like me.”

“But you are not clumsy—you are not at all clumsy,” It was not the speech of a smart young lady, it was not true, it was not subtle, above all, it was unworthy of the author of “The Patrician,” and by the light of the inner mind she knew this only too well, but the stage-manager of the pleasant little comedy understood the business better than did she. The crude simplicity for which she could have wept at the moment her lips betrayed it, really met the situation exactly. In spite of her lineage—or perhaps because of it—Lord Duckingfield was more than ever convinced that she was a very nice little girl.