Allison Brownley pushed her escort in. He seemed to be reluctant but she had her hands on his back and he came through the door, stumbling.
“We can come to the high brow party, can’t we?” cried Allison. “Can’t we have some food? We’re perfectly starved and there wasn’t a table to be had at the Rose Garden.”
“I knew you must have been driven out of everywhere to come home this early,” called Gage, “though of course young men in the banking business might benefit by somewhat earlier hours.”
The young man laughed awkwardly. He was a rather pale, small young man, badly dwarfed by Gage’s unusual bulk and suggesting a consciousness of it when he tried to draw Allison to the other end of the room. But she preferred Gage for the moment. She was not a pretty girl though she made that negligible. What was important about her was her vigor and her insolent youngness. Her hair was cut just below her ears and curled under in an outstanding shock and her scarlet evening dress and touches of rouge made Margaret, as she stood beside her, seem paler, older, without vigor. But she stood there only a moment, poised. Then the others, six of them, had invaded the dining room. Giggling, spurting into noisy laughter at unrevealed jokes, eating greedily, separating from the older people as if nothing in common could be conceived among them, they went to the farther end of the room, Allison with some youthfully insolent remark hurled back at Gage.
The others seemed suddenly conscious that it was midnight—the time when only extreme youth had a right to be enjoying itself. They took upon themselves the preliminary airs of departure. But Helen, separating herself from the group, went down the room to the young people.
They had settled into chairs and began to rise a little awkwardly but she did not let them, sitting down herself on the arm of Allison’s chair and bending to talk to them all. They burst into gales of laughter at something she said. Gage and Jerrold watched her from the other end of the room.
It was wonderful, thought Gage, how even beside those young faces, her beauty stood out as more brilliant. How her hair shone under those soft lights! How golden, mellow, she was in every gesture!
Jerrold, in need of some one to whom to comment, isolated Margaret.
“Watch your amazing friend,” he said, “those children made us feel old and stiff muscled. See how she is showing us that they are raw and full of angles.”
“Is it important?” asked Margaret.