"You do look beautiful. I don't know just why. I never saw you look just like this before; kind, but years older than I am, and miles away. Neil——"
"Yes, dear."
"Neil, don't think any more. Just love me.... I love you."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Colonel Everard's little party was quite successful enough without the guest of honour. At least, it would have seemed so to Judith, if she could have looked in upon it just before midnight. A distinguished guest of the Colonel's had made an ungrateful criticism of the inner circle, on parade for his benefit only the week before at Camp Hiawatha, which was elaborately rebuilt now, and rechristened Camp Everard. He complained that the Colonel's parties were too successful.
"Too many pretty women," he said, "or they work too hard at it—dress too well, or talk too well—don't dare to let down. You need more background, more men like Grant. You need to be bored. You can't have cream without milk. You can't take the essentials of a society and make a whole society out of them without adulterating them. It won't last. That's why Adam and Eve didn't stay in the garden. They couldn't—too much tension there. They needed casual acquaintances, and you need background. You can't get on without it."
"We do," said his host.
The distinguished critic was far away from the Colonel's town to-night, but the Colonel's party was all that he had complained of; the thing he had felt and tried to account for and explain was here, as it was at all the Colonel's parties, though a discreet selection of outsiders had been admitted to-night; the same sense of effort and tension, of working too hard, of a gayety brilliant but forced—artificial, but justifying the elaborate processes that created it by its charm, like some rare hothouse flower.
You saw it in quick glimpses of passing faces thrown into strong relief by the light of the swinging lanterns, and then dancing out of sight; you heard it in strained, sweet laughter, and felt it in the beat of the music, and in the whole picture the party made of itself in the garden, the restless, changing picture, but this was not all—it was in the air. You could close your eyes and breathe it and feel it. It was unusually keen to-night, real, like a thing you could actually touch and see.