“Do you think so? Look at the turtle-doves billing and cooing. Isn’t it sweet?”
Mademoiselle nodded towards the veranda, with keen scrutiny of her companion’s face. Ursula blushed again, that terrible tell-tale blush.
“And this place with all the boats,” she said, “I suppose is Venice?”
The guests began to arrive, and Mevrouw van Trossart pushed her cap across from the right to the left. It was quite a young people’s entertainment, more or less impromptu, and Ursula, already so greatly distressed by her toilet, noticed that many of the girls were more simply dressed than she. The acuteness of annoyance about this deadened, for a time, the sick anxiety at her heart.
She went out into the garden; she had fancied the fête would mean music and refreshments and fireworks; she now suddenly saw that the marquee was prepared for dancing. There had been no intimation, that she knew, on her card. She had never learned the art.
“May I have the first valse?” asked Willie van Troyen, who had just been introduced, for that purpose, by the Baroness.
“I don’t dance,” she said, pulling at her gloves. “I didn’t know people were going to.”
“They often do,” said Willie, “don’t they, at a dance?” He laughed heartily; he thought that was rather witty. And he betook himself to some one else.
So Ursula sat in a corner of the tent, or out on a bench, and was a bore.