“Don’t pay the slightest attention to her,” said Gwen, looking wrathfully at Jan over the red-flannel swathings of her throat—Hummie always insisted on the efficacy of that color for such purposes. “After you leave the dressing-room you keep with Dorothy Schuyler and Cena North. They’ve got sense enough to appreciate you! And they’re my friends. You’ll have a good time, because there’ll be plenty of good times there to have, and when there are, you don’t miss them.”
Gwen, with mistaken zeal, made a few vigorous remarks to Gladys before they set forth, telling her what she thought of her slighting Jan, and bidding her be nice to her at the party, under threat of wrath to come. The result of this well-meant interference was that Gladys sulked, settling herself in her corner of the carriage without speaking to Jan during the drive. After they arrived she compelled Susan to arrange her hair and dress first, and she then left the dressing-room without waiting for Jan, who had to find her way, frightened and hurt, to the parlors alone.
“Isn’t Gwen coming?” asked Dorothy Schuyler, standing near their hostess, when Gladys entered.
“Gwen has a sore throat. She’s dreadfully disappointed. She cared more about coming than I did,” said Gladys.
“And Jan wouldn’t leave her, I suppose?” suggested Dorothy.
“Oh, Jan is here. She is coming right down,” said Gladys, trying to speak easily.
Dorothy gave her one of the glances which Gwen had said “made you curl up,” and went swiftly into the hall. Here she found Jan coming hesitatingly down-stairs through the group of boys lounging part way up, waiting for “the party to begin.” They all stared at Jan, glad of something prettier to look at than one another, for, though some of them were already young dandies, most of them despised the stiff costume to which even the younger lord of creation is condemned at festivities, and were wondering, each individually, if he “looked as big a fool in his stiff collar as the other fellows did.”
Jan gave a sigh of relief as she caught sight of Dorothy. It seemed to her that she could not enter that crowded room alone. Dorothy noticed with pleasure that Jan looked very charming in soft, delicate green, which gave her, with her brown eyes and hair, the effect of some sylvan creature.
It was not so very bad after all to get to her hostess and make her salutations now that kind Dorothy was at her elbow, and when the ordeal was over Jan turned to enjoying herself with her tendency to make the best of things.
There was to be dancing after supper, but first the young guests grouped themselves around the open fire for the fagot burning and story-telling. Dorothy began, and told a pretty legend of Brittany, not long, but much longer than Daisy Hammond’s, who had brought a tiny bundle of three lightest twigs, and related a tragic tale in two stanzas of “nonsense rhymes.”