Chapter Nine.
“What Made the Ball so Fine?”
“But come; our dance, I pray:
She dances featly.”
A Winter’s Tale.
The ball at Brocklehurst was this year anticipated with more than ordinary interest. It was to be an unusually good one, said the local authorities; all the “best” houses in the neighbourhood were to be filled for it; the regiment at the nearest garrison town was a deservedly popular one, and at least three recognised beauties were expected to be present.
All these facts were discussed with eagerness by the young people round about Brocklehurst, to whom a ball of any kind was an event, to whom this special ball was the event of the year. And in few family circles was it more talked about than in the isolated Rectory at Hathercourt, by few girls was it looked forward to with more anticipation of enjoyment than by the Western sisters. Yet it was not the first, nor the second, nor, in the case of Lilias, the third Brocklehurst ball even, at which they had “assisted,” and only a few weeks previous Miss Western had been seriously talking of declining for the future to take part in the great annual festivity. And here she was now, the week before, as interested in the question of the pretty fresh dresses, which, by an extra turn or two of the screw of economy, the mother had managed to provide for her girls, as if she were again a débutante of seventeen; and, more wonderful still, the excitement had proved infectious, for Mary, sober-minded Mary, was full of it too. She could think of little else than what Lilias was to wear, how Lilias was to look—but for Lilias, the consideration of what Mary was to wear, how Mary was to look, would have been very summarily dismissed.
It is not easy, even with the most unselfish and “managing” of mothers, with the most—theoretically, at least—indulgent of fathers; with two pair of fairly clever hands, and two or three numbers of the latest fashion books, it is not easy, out of what a girl like Alys Cheviott would have thought a not extravagant price for a garden-hat, or a new parasol, to devise for one’s self a ball-dress, in which to appear with credit to one’s self and one’s belongings, on such an occasion as a Brocklehurst ball. And at first the difficulties had appeared so insuperable that Mary had proposed that the whole of the funds should be appropriated to the purchase of a dress for Lilias only.
“You could get one really handsome dress—handsome of its kind, that is to say—for what will only provide two barely wearable ones,” she said, appealingly, “and, Lilias, you should be nicely dressed for once.”
“And you?” said Lilias, aghast.