"I'll put you to the test later on," he said, with an amused laugh. "I must go now, and translate myself into Charles Surface, or I'll be late."
Left alone again, she turned back to her looking-glass and sighed; but a single glance at it comforted her surprisingly.
"He was in a hurry," she reflected, by way of further consolation, "and I've got four dances with him after all."
Theo Desmond inscribed few names on his programme beyond those of his wife, Mrs Olliver, and Honor Meredith.
"You must let me have a good few dances, Honor," he said to her, "and hang Mrs Grundy! We are outsiders here, and you and I understand one another."
She surrendered her programme with smiling submission. "Do you always order people to give you dances in that imperative fashion?"
"Only when I'm set on having them, and daren't risk refusal! I'll go one better than Paul, if I may. I didn't know he had it in him to be so grasping."
And he returned the card on which the initials P. W. appeared four times in Wyndham's neat handwriting.
Never, in all his days had Paul asked a woman to give him four dances; and as he claimed Honor for the first of them, he wondered whether his new-found boldness would carry him farther still. Her beauty and graciousness, her enthusiasm over the afternoon's triumph, exalted him from the sober levels of patience and modesty to unscaled heights of aspiration. But not until their second valse together did an opening for speech present itself.