“She’s practising her steps,” said Mary, “for the grand ball.”
“Dear me, dear me,” Mrs. Douglas said. “How well I know by myself! Many’s the time I’ve danced about the house so that nothing would keep me still—but ye see what it all comes to. It’s just vanity and maybe worse than vanity—and fades away like the morning dew.”
“But, mother,” said Kirsteen, “it was not your dancing nor the pleasure you’ve had that made you ill; so we cannot say that’s what it comes to.”
“Pleasure!” said her mother. “It’s very little pleasure I have had in my life since I marriet your father and came to this quiet place. Na, na, it’s no pleasure—I was very light-hearted in my nature though you would not think it. But that’s a thing that cannot last.”
“But you had it, mother,” said Mary, “even if it was short. There was that ball you went to when you were sixteen, and the spangled muslin you had on, and the officer that tore it with his spurs.”
Mrs. Douglas’s eyes lit up with a faint reflection of bygone fire. “Eh, that spangled muslin,” she said, “I’ll never forget it, and what they all said to me when I came home. It was not like the grand gowns that are the fashion now. It was one of the last of the old mode before those awfu’ doings at the French Revolution that changed everything. My mother wore a hoop under her gown standing out round her like a cart-wheel. I was not old enough for that; but there was enough muslin in my petticoat to have made three of these bit skimpit things.”
“I just wish,” said Mary with a sigh, “that we had it now.”
“It would be clean out of the fashion if ye had it; and what would ye do with a spangled muslin here? Ye must have parties to go to, before ye have any need for fine cla’es.”
Mary breathed again that profound sigh. “There’s the ball at the Castle,” she said.
“Lord keep us!” cried her mother. “Your faither would take our heads off our shoulders if ye breathed a word of that.”