"Come in!" said Peggy's joyous voice. Marjorie entered, and found
Peggy in the throes of indecision herself.
"You're just what I wanted to see!" said she. "Would you wear this green silk that's grand and low, but a bit short for the last styles, or this muslin that I graduated in, and it's as long as the moral law, and I slashed out the neck—but a bit plain?"
"Why, that's just what I came to ask you," said Marjorie. "What kind of clothes do you wear for dances like these?"
"Well, the grander the better, to-night, as I was telling everybody over the telephone. Mrs. Schneider, now, the priest's housekeeper, she has a red satin that she'll be sure to wear,—and the saints keep her from wearing her pink satin slippers with it, but I don't think they can. It would be a strong saint at the least," said Peggy thoughtfully. "I'd better be in my green."
"Then I can wear——" said Marjorie, and stopped to consider. She had one frock that was very gorgeous, and she decided to wear it. It would certainly seem meek contrasted with Mrs. Schneider's red satin.
"Come on, and I'll bring this, and we can hook each other up," Peggy proposed ardently, and followed her down in a kimono.
So they hooked each other up, except where there were snappers, and admired each other exceedingly. Marjorie's frock was a yellow one that Lucille had hounded her into buying, and she looked as vivid in it as a firefly.
Francis had been given orders to wear his uniform, which he was doing. He looked very natural that way to Marjorie; there were others of the men in uniform as well. There were perhaps twenty people already arrived when the girls came downstairs, seven or eight girls and twelve or fourteen men. And Marjorie discovered that young persons in the backwoods believed in dressing up to their opportunities. Some of the frocks were obviously home-made, but all were gorgeous, even in the case of one black-eyed habitant damsel who had constructed a confection, copied accurately and cleverly from some advanced fashion-paper, out of cheesecloth and paper muslin!
One of the men was sacrificed to the phonograph, and for hours it never stopped going. Records had been brought by others of the men and girls, and Marjorie had never seen such gay and unwearied dancing. She was tossed and caught from one big backwoodsman to another, the dances being "cut-in" shamelessly, because the women were fewer than the men. They nearly all danced well, French or Yankee or Englishmen. There were a couple of young Englishmen whom she particularly liked, who had ridden twenty miles, she heard, to come and dance. And finally she found herself touched on the shoulder by her own husband, and dancing smoothly away with him.
"This isn't much like the last time and place where we danced," he said, smiling down at her and then glancing at the big, bare room with its kerosene lamps and bough-trimmed walls. "Do you remember?"