Then over the first notes she forgot what she meant to do. She was alone with herself—she had forgotten the others. And because she had forgotten, the things happened to the others as she had meant them to happen. Gage, bidding deliberately to make his hand the dummy, left the card table and outside the door of the music room found Margaret, also listening. They took refuge in immediate conversation.
“So she keeps up her music,” said Margaret.
“Yes. She works several hours a day. And we have an excellent teacher out here in the wilderness.”
With a formal excuse, he returned to his bridge game.
II
At midnight Mrs. Brownley broke up the bridge by summoning the players to the dining room where there were iced drinks and sandwiches. Mrs. Brownley did that sort of thing extremely well. Men used to say with gratitude that she knew enough not to keep them up all night, and her informal buffet suppers closed the evening comfortably for them. It was a “young” crowd to-night—not young according to the standards of the débutante Brownleys but people between thirty and forty. The Stantons, whom everybody had everywhere because they were good company and perfectly fitting in any group. Emily Haight, who had become ash-blond and a little caustic with the decreasing possibilities of a good marriage but whom every one conceded had a good mind, who “read everything” and played a master hand of bridge. She had sat next to Walter Carpenter at dinner, as she inevitably was placed when they were in the same company, because they had known each other so well and long and because it seemed to be in the back of people’s mind that steady propinquity ought to produce results in emotion. He was quite the person for Emily—about her age, well-to-do, popular, keen-minded. But to-night at dinner he had devoted himself almost pointedly to Margaret Duffield. They had rallied him afterwards at the card table about his sudden interest in feminism and he had smiled his self-controlled smile and let them have their joke. He had played cards with Jerrold Haynes, another of Mrs. Brownley’s “intellectuals,” who had written a book once, and had it published (though never another), and who managed to concoct, with the help of Helen Flandon, almost all the clever remarks which were au courant in their particular circle. He and Carpenter had tried to make Margaret play bridge but she had told them that she couldn’t, reducing them to a three-handed game which they were ready to abandon at twelve o’clock.
Jerrold went as usual to Helen’s side. There was a friendship between them which bathed in a kind of half-serious worship on his part and a bantering comradeship on hers. They sat together in a corner of the long, oak-paneled dining room and made conversation about the others, conversation for the sake of clever words.
“Walter has made his way to the candle flame again. He seems to have been captured,” said Jerrold.
Helen looked across the room curiously. Gage and Walter were both talking to Margaret who was standing in a little glow of electric candle light. Helen remembered that in college Margaret had done her hair that same way, in a loose knot modeled after some sculptured Psyche.
“Don’t you think she is lovely?” she asked more in comment than question.