“Mrs. Roberts!” to the symphony in pink-and-silver—“I bespeak your admiration for my friend and school-crony”—etc., etc., until the blushing débutante was the focus of six pairs of eyes, critical, indifferent, and amiable, and wished that dear Kitty were not so incorrigibly enthusiastic in praising those she loved.
Anyone but a refined novice would have divined at once that the act of passing her around, like a plate of hot cakes, argued one of two things—either that she was a “professional” of some sort, or that her hostess was lamentably ignorant of the law demanding that the one to be honored by an introduction should stand still and have the other party to the ceremony brought to her. Kitty, at least, was no novice, and everybody except her “school-crony” comprehended exactly what the scene meant. Although she did not suspect it, she was on trial when she sat down to the piano, the show-woman beside her, as the guileless guest supposed, to give her affectionate encouragement. The first flash of her fingers across the keys was the signal for general silence, and the clapping of gloved hands at the conclusion of the brilliant overture attested intelligent appreciation. She was not allowed to leave the music stool for half an hour, one piece after another being called for, and the choice of selections putting her on her mettle. Her auditors were used to good music, and the assumption that she would gratify them was a delicate compliment.
Kitty came to her elbow at length with a glass of clear liquid, sparkling with pounded ice.
“Only lime-juice and water,” she whispered, “to clear your voice. I have praised your singing until everybody is wild to hear you.”
Susie smiled happily, glancing over her shoulder with an unconscious and graceful gesture of gratitude; a bow, slight, but comprehensive, she might have but had not copied from a popular prima donna. Another rapid run of the nimble fingers over the responsive ivory, and she glided into the prelude to Gounod’s never-trite song, “Chantez! Riez! Dormez!”
She had sung but a few bars when her ear caught the muffled tread of feet in the hall. A side-glance at the mirror showed her a picture that might have been clipped from her British contes de société, the grouping of manly faces and fashionable dress coats in the curtained arch, all intent upon herself as the enchantress who held them mute and eager. Electric fire streamed through her veins, her voice soared and swelled as never before; her enunciation, exquisitely pure and clear, carried each word up to the loftiest story of the stilled mansion:
“Ah! riez, ma belle! riez! riez, toujours!”
“Fine, by Jove, now!” cried a big mustached man at Arthur’s side, as the last notes died upon ecstatic ears. “Patti couldn’t have done it better!”
The husband repeated this with other encomiums to the songstress after they got home. He made the tired but animated little woman sit down in an armchair and pulled off her rubbers and unbuttoned her boots in far different fashion from that in which the sleepy Abigail had put them on the feet and helped truss up the train of “the woman who hadn’t come in a carriage like decent folks.”
He had had a stupid evening. He couldn’t make the women talk to him. He was not “a ladies’ man,” and every mother’s daughter of them took in the truth at a glance. The men gabbled over their wine of what did not interest him, of clubs and horse races, and the fluctuations of fancy stocks. He neither smoked nor drank, and was the only man there who did not do both. His wife’s music was to him the only redeeming feature of the occasion, and he would have enjoyed that more in his own parlor. But she was enraptured with everything and full of delightful anticipations. “Everybody had been so nice and kind, and what did ill-natured people mean by saying there was no real sociability among fashionable people? For her part, she believed that the higher one mounted in the social scale the more genuine goodness and refined feeling she would find.” Several of the ladies had promised to call upon her, and, as one said, “to take her in with them.”