Still, at the moment such thoughts were far removed from the region of the practical. Yet Bill was a marquis, so his sister said. Therefore he was simply asking for trouble, from even the humblest of Columbia’s daughters. If Miss Three Ply, who had kind of appointed herself to look after the sweet rube, did not watch out, some other young skirt might easily get away with his coronet.
However, these were vain thoughts. At the present time Miss Du Rance had about fifty dollars between herself and bankruptcy. So really and truly the ice was thin. But she was determined to yield to the passing hour, even if she could never quite forget her nearness to unplumbed fathoms of icy water.
If she could have laid that knowledge by, these two crowded hours at the Orient Dance Club would have been the jolliest ever. This was a real taste of life. All was harmony, gaiety, good-humoured fun. But the clock struck seven, the band stopped playing, the dancers began to collect their taxis. Then it was that a kind of Cinderella feeling came upon Mame.
The ball was over. The dream was at an end. She would have to go back to Montacute Square, to inferior food and inferior people, to drudgery and grubbing, to the forming of plans for a mighty precarious to-morrow. As she stood on the Club steps by the side of Lady Violet, who was giving her friends a cheerful good-bye, Mame’s heart sank. She had been lifted up only to be cast down. Life was pretty tough for girls of her sort, with nothing between them and the weather. She watched Bill hand Miss Childwick into the smartest limousine imaginable, with chauffeur and footman complete in dark liveries faced with buff; and a Robert-E.-Lee-at-Gettysburg feeling came upon her.
“Which way are you goin’?”
Lady Violet’s clear gay voice suddenly impinged upon the bitterness of Mame’s reverie.
Mame hardly knew which way she was going. And at that moment she didn’t care. The bottom seemed out of things. “Any old way, I guess, is good enough for me,” she said despondently.
Lady Violet laughed. Mame had a great power of making this high-flyer laugh, but why she should have she didn’t know. But the laugh was friendly and kind; it implied no more than an unlimited capacity for seeing the most human side of human nature.
“Will you come and take pot luck with me at my club?”
Nascent hope stirred in Mame. Life could not be altogether a washout while twenty-two-carat fairy godmothers were out and about in it.