How the old voluptuary feasted his eyes upon this beautiful apparition! He was all fire and flame instantly, like an old worm-eaten tree stump, which blazes up whenever the young herdsmen smoke the wasps out of its hollow trunk.
He had no longer a single look for the countess, but followed close upon the heels of the beautiful châtelaine, though Valentine occasionally, as if by accident, gave him a violent nudge in the ribs with his elbow, or trod sharply on his foot with his spurred boots.
At table, the enamored Zurdoki distinguished pretty Michal so very markedly that all the women present whispered spiteful things to each other about it. The countess was naturally an exception. She only laughed at the coxcombry of the old inamorato, and was quite persuaded beforehand that such a sage damsel as pretty Michal would be more than a match for him.
After dinner, the martial and amatory airs which had been played during the banquet were succeeded by dance music, and the guests flocked into the dancing-room.
The Hungarian dances of those days were very different from the dances we dance now. What are now called csardaszes and friszes were then only danced at rustic weddings. At polite entertainments, the dance consisted of slow and stately figures, accompanied by the clash of colliding spurs, of rhythmical involutions, and evolutions, with much extending of hands and kneeling on cushions, or, at most, of a defiant manly stamping with the feet and majestic movements of the body; not like our present system of dancing, when everyone seems bent on jostling his neighbor into a corner, and makes a whirligig of his partner. The earlier dances did very well for a time, whose motto was, Festina lente!
The ball began with the minuet-like dance known as the palotas. It was Zurdoki's duty as host to open the ball, and he lost no time in doing so. With grandiose aplomb, he sauntered up to the fairest of the fair, and held toward her a silken handkerchief as a sign that he had chosen her for his partner. This was, indeed, a notable distinction for Michal, especially as the countess was also present in the saloon.
But pretty Michel did not accept the extended handkerchief, the other corner of which she ought to have held so as to begin the palotas, but bowed modestly, and said so that everyone could hear it: "Your pardon, gracious sir! but I've only been a poor serving maid and have never learnt dancing!"
And this was no more than the simple truth, for she certainly had been a serving maid and never learnt dancing.
At this unexpected rebuff, Zurdoki became as red as a turkey cock, and in his fury sought out the most hideous woman in the room. This was old Dame Fürmender, and with her he opened the ball.
And during the whole of the dance he was cudgeling his brains as to the meaning of pretty Michal's words. "She had not learnt to dance because she was only a serving maid! Now serving maids can dance, and dance very well too! Yet surely she must have spoken the truth, for otherwise she would never have dared to publicly put to shame her host when he invited her to dance. Who are the women who really do not dance? Why, who but the daughters of Protestant pastors?"