“Perhaps we had better not have any cotillion,” she said sternly. “If I hear another hiss—” There was a dead silence.
Dicky sat primly, looking at the ceiling. As he had expected, a broad violet streamer fell in his lap. He leaped to the floor, seized Cecelia by her skirt, hustled the tomboy, as in duty bound, within the purple leash, and beckoned to the next girl in the row. They arranged themselves three abreast, and he drove them, to the inspiring two-step, across the room, in line with two other drivers similarly equipped. On the return trip they were confronted by three bands of prancing little boys, perilously realistic in their interpretation of the pretty figure, and as they met in the middle, with a scramble of adjustment, the steeds paired off neatly, and the flushed drivers, more or less entangled in their long ribbons, accomplished an ultimate two-step.
“Now, you choose me,” he commanded, as they scrambled into the chairs. Again she smiled, again she hid her cheek with her hair.
“All right,” she said again.
In vain Louise Hetherington made signs to him; in vain the rosy blonde snapped her fingers—he was blind and deaf. He slipped into the broad blue ribbon she held out to him at arm’s length, and cantered cheerfully before her, her slave forever. How lightly she floated on behind them! Not like that tomboy Frances, who clucked at her team as if they were horses, and nearly ran them down; nor like that silly, fat, yellow-curled Gladys, who bubbled with laughter and hung back on the satin reins until her team nearly fell over. Cecelia swam like thistledown in their wake, and slipped the ribbon over their heads with all the effect of a scarf dance.
“How lightly she floated on behind them!”
“That will do for to-day,” said Miss Dorothy, gathering up the ribbons, and they surged into the dressing-rooms, to be buttoned up and pulled out of draughts and trundled home.
She was swathed carefully in a wadded silk jacket, and then enveloped in a hooded Mother Hubbard cloak; she looked like an angelic brownie. Dicky ran up to her as a woman led her out to a coupé at the curb, and tugged at the ribbon of her cloak.
“Where do you live? Say, where do you?” he demanded.