"I wish I was as young as you, Martha," Sophie said.
"Lord, lovey, you will be when you're my age," Martha replied, with a swift, twinkling glance of her blue eyes. "But you're coming ... aren't you? I won't have the heart to wear my pink stockings if you don't, Sophie. Mrs. Newton gave them to me for a Christmas-box ... and I'm fair dying to wear them."
Sophie smiled at the pair of bright pink stockings pinned on the line beside a newly-starched petticoat.
"You will, won't you?"
Sophie shook her head.
"I don't think so, Martha."
Sophie went out of the doorway. She was going home, and stood again a moment, looking through scattered trees to the waning afternoon sky. A couple of birds dashed across her line of vision with shrill, low, giggling cries.
She heard people talking in the distance. Several men rode up to Newton's. She saw them swing from their horses, put the reins over the pegs before the bar, and go into the hotel. Two or three children ran down the street chattering eagerly, excitedly. Roy O'Mara went across to the hall with some flags under his arm. From all the huts drifted ejaculations, fragments of laughter and calling. Excitement about the ball was in the air.
Sophie remembered how happy and excited she used to be about the Ridge balls. She thought of it all vaguely at first, that lost girlish joy of hers, the free, careless gaiety which had swept her along as she danced. She remembered her father's fiddling, Mrs. Newton's playing; how the music had had a magic in it which set everybody's feet flying and the boys singing to tunes they knew. The men polished the floor so that you could scarcely walk on it. One year they had spent hours working it up so that you slipped along like greased lightning as you danced.
Sophie smiled at her reminiscences. The high tones of a man's voice, eager and exultant, shouting to someone across the twilight; the twitter of a girl's laughter—they were all in the air now as they had been then. Her listlessness stirred; everybody was preparing for the ball, and getting ready to go to it. Excitement and eager looking forward to a good time were in the air. They were infectious. Sophie trembled to them—they tempted her. Could she go to the ball, like everybody else? Could she drift again in the stream of easy and genial intercourse with all these people of the Ridge whom she loved and who loved her?