Jack had crossed the room, giving what he called the cheering jolly to several young women on the way, and he turned quickly:
“At your service, Miss Dameron,”—and he bowed impressively.
“Mr. Leighton is crazy about your singing. He is just waiting for a chance to congratulate you. But he’s very unhappy to-night. Words fail him.” And she shook her head and looked into Balcomb’s grinning face as though this were a great grief between them.
“What kind of a jolly is this? I say, Morris, you look like first and second grave-digger done into one. We’re not playing Hamlet now. But I can tell you, Miss Dameron, that when Brother Leighton—he belongs to my frat, hence the brother—did Hamlet over at our dear old alma mater, the gloom that settled down on that township could have been cut up into badges of mourning enough to have supplied Spain through her little affair with these states. That’s Walt Whitman,—‘these states.’ Do you know, I was Ophelia to his Hamlet, and if I do say it myself, I was a sweet thing in Ophelias.”
“I don’t doubt you were, Mr. Balcomb,” said Zelda.
“There was just one thing lacking in your impersonation,” declared Leighton: “you ought to have been drowned in the first scene of the first act to have made it perfect.”
“No violence, gentlemen, I beg of you!” And Zelda hurried across the room to where Herr Schmidt was assembling the principals.
“Say, that girl has got the art of stringing down fine. She seems to have you going all right. You look like twenty-nine cents at a thirty-cent bargain counter. But you take it too hard. I wish she’d string me! They’re never so much interested as when they throw you on your face and give you the merry tra la. I tell you I’ve had experience with the sect all right, and I know!”
“Yes, I remember your flirtations with the girls that waited on table at the college boarding-house. You had a very cheering way with them.”
Balcomb’s eyes were running restlessly over the groups of young people. He was appraising and fixing them in his mind as he talked. His joy in being among them,—these representative young people of the city, whose names he knew well from long and diligent perusal of the personal and society column of the daily papers,—amused Leighton; but the fellow’s self-satisfaction irritated him, too.