Chapter Nine.
Avant le Bal.
Terpsichore, at a fashionable watering-place in the New World, affects pretty much the same airs as in the Old.
In a ball-room, where all are not supposed to be best people, the solitary gentlemen-stranger finds but little opportunity of taking exercise—especially in the “square-dances.” As the coteries make the sets, and monopolise the choicest portions of the floor, when the room is crowded and everybody determined to dance, the unlucky wight, without acquaintances, finds himself sadly overlooked. The stewards are usually too much occupied with themselves, to remember those honorary duties represented by rosette or ribbon in the buttonhole.
When it comes to the “round,” the stranger stands a better chance. It is only a matter of mutual consent between two individuals; and he must be a very insignificant personage, indeed, who cannot then find some neglected wallflower willing to accommodate him.
Something of this frigidity might have been felt in the atmosphere of a Newport ball-room; even in those days, ante bellum, when shoddy was a thing unheard-of, and “ile” lay “unstruck” in the dark underground.
Something of it was felt by the young officer lately returned from Mexico, and who was in fact a greater stranger to the “society” of the country for which he had been fighting, than to that against which he had fought!
In both he was but a traveller—half-wandering waif, half-adventurer—guided in his peregrinations less by interest than inclination.
To go dancing among unknown people is about the dullest occupation to which a traveller can betake himself; unless the dance be one of the free kind, where introductions are easy—morris, masque, or fandango.
Maynard knew, or conjectured, this to be true of Newport, as elsewhere. But for all that, he had determined on going to the ball.