In the intervals of going to town, there were calls to be received, some from married women, and some from young girls who were asked especially to meet Dosia, and who expressed pleasure that she was to spend the winter with them. She was asked to join a book club and a card club, and to pour tea at the next meeting of the Junior Guild—proceedings that at the first blush appeared radiantly festive. It was understood that she was to be of the inner circle.
When the other functions took place, Dosia was a success both at the concert and the bazaar; a score of youths were introduced to her, with whom she laughed and chatted and promenaded and danced; she danced every time. The society of a new place is apt to appear extraordinarily attractive until one begins to resolve it into its component parts, when it is seen to differ but little from that one has hitherto known. Of these dancing youths, Dosia was yet to realize that half of them were younger even than she; some who seemed to take a great fancy for her were the bores whom all the other girls got rid of, if possible; others were just a little below the grade of real refinement; the really nice fellows were not there at all, with the exception of a stray few, and those who were attendant on their fiancées. Just at present the rhythm of the music and the joy of motion were all in all to Dosia. Her honest and artless pleasure shone so plainly from her face that for the moment it was a compelling attraction in itself—for the moment, as neither good looks, nor honesty, nor the artlessness of joy in one’s own pleasure, serve as a power of fascination: it takes a subtler quality, combined of both sympathy and reserve—something always given, something always withheld.
This happiness of healthy youth, which as yet depended on no individual note, could last but such a brief time! When she looked back upon it, it seemed like a little sunny, transfigured place that somebody else had lived in—the Dosia who was just glad.
Lois watched her enjoyment, half preoccupied, yet smilingly, pleased with the girl’s prettiness and success. Dosia thought, “How kind she is!” and yet, when another woman came to her and said, with warm impulsiveness, “My dear child, it’s a pleasure to look at you!” she felt that she had now the one thing she had missed.
She went to the last evening of the bazaar clad in a floating blue gown that matched her eyes. The curve of her arms, bare to the elbow, the way the tendrils of her hair fell across her forehead, her sudden dimpling smile, the glad, unconscious motions of her beautiful youth, would have made her, to those who loved, the personification of darling maidenhood, with that haunting tinge of pathos which is the inheritance of the woman-child.
She sold more flowers than any other girl at the bazaar that night, and there she met Mr. Sutton, who had, indeed, called upon her, but at a time when she was out. This guaranteed man was rather short, stocky, and common-place-looking, with a large, round, beardless face, and a long, newly shaven upper lip. But his appearance made no difference; Dosia’s radiant happiness flowed over on him with impartial delight, and if she sold many flowers, it was he who bought most of them, presenting them to her again afterwards, so that one corner of the room was heaped up with her spoils, and her arms were full of roses. She trailed around the crowded room with him in her blue gown, as he had insisted on her advice in buying, and received gifts of books and candy in the interests of organized charity. It was like being in the Arabian Nights to have inconsequent gifts showered upon one in this way, but she succeeded in dissuading him from offering her a large green and pink flowered plaque of local art, and was relieved when he gave it to the lady who had it for sale.
“A bachelor has use for so few things, Miss Linden,” he said apologetically. “Each lady makes me promise—weeks beforehand—to come and buy from her especial table. If they would only have something I could want,”—he looked at her humorously,—“it would be easy enough to keep my word. Why don’t they ever sell things a man can use? But look for yourself, Miss Linden—it’s charity to help me out.” He paused irresolutely by a yellow-draped table. “Might you like some sewing-bags, now, or this piece of linen with little holes in it, or any of these—plush arrangements?”
“No!” said Dosia, laughing and shaking her head, “I mightn’t.”
“Or a doll, now?” He had strayed a step farther on. “Would you like a doll for Mrs. Alexander’s little girl, and some of these charming toys?”
“Oh, how lovely of you!” said Dosia, touched in the sweetest part of her nature, and turning up to him a face of such childlike and fervent gratitude that it was like a little rift of heavenly blue let in upon the scene. George Sutton’s seasoned heart gave an unexpected thump. He was used to feeling susceptible to the presence of a pretty girl; it had been his normal condition ever since he first grew up, when a girl had been a forbidden distraction in an existence devoted to earning and living on eight dollars a week; when he slept in the office, and studied Spanish in a night class. He had given a dozen or more years of his life to amassing a comfortable fortune before he felt himself at liberty to give any time to society; he had always cherished an old-fashioned idea that a man should be able to surround a woman with luxuries before asking her to marry him, and now that he had money, it was no secret that he was looking for a wife to share it. There was hardly a young woman in the place who had not been the recipient of the ardor of his glances, as well as of more substantial tokens of his regard; his sentimental remarks had been confided by one girl to another. But further than this, much as he desired marriage, George had not gone. Susceptibility has this drawback: it is hard to concentrate it permanently on one person. George Sutton’s heart performed the pleasing miracle of always burning, yet never being consumed. Under all his amatory sentiment was the cool streak of common sense that showed so strongly in his business relations, and kept him from committing himself to the permanent selection of a partner who might prove, after all, to have no real fitness for the part. He was fond of saying that he had never made a bad bargain.