“I shall tell my mother I have set my heart on having a dance. How can you expect a man to stick to his home as you wish if he has nothing to amuse him? I will settle all that with my mother myself,” said Dolff, somewhat magisterially. He turned round upon her, however, after a moment: “If you don’t interfere.”
“Why should I interfere, if it makes you happy? To be sure it is a great trouble turning everything upside down.”
“One would think you were forty, Gussy!”
“I am not so young as you, at all events,” she said.
Gussy was as good as her word, and did not interfere. Even when she was privately consulted by her mother she said nothing against Dolff’s wish.
“If it keeps him up to the mark,” said Mrs. Harwood. “It is such a pleasure to see him so nice, to see him so improved—none of those wanderings out at night.”
“Yes, it is a great improvement,” said Gussy. She shook her head, with a sigh, and hoped that it would last.
“It has lasted a month,” said Mrs. Harwood, “I see no reason why it should not last forever. How can I refuse him anything when he is so good? Vicars will not like it. It distracts his mind, and he says he never knows what may happen: but I think I can smooth down Vicars, Gussy, if you are sure that you approve.”
“Oh, yes, I approve,” said Gussy, “anything to keep him steady.”
But Gussy herself was still young enough, and she thought of all the opportunities of the dance and the talks aside, the conversations in quiet corners, which were legitimate on such an occasion, with a little stir in her heart. At the piano, even though it was at the other end of the room, it was still under her mother’s eyes. She never saw her lover, never talked with him except under her mother’s eyes. How could he say anything under such circumstances? Her heart was a little sick that it should all go on forever in the same way, without the least progress. He talked about the songs, or about Janet and her influence on Dolff, laughing at what he said he had foreseen from the first. Gussy did not quite like the discussion of her brother, who, after all, was her brother, and not to be dissected as Charley loved to do, and she was not fond of hearing so much about Miss Summerhayes. There was no special interest in Miss Summerhayes that she should be the object of so much conversation between the two. And Gussy could not help thinking with a little pleasure of all the possibilities of the ball, where it was not only possible that two could talk together quite untrammelled, but where it was even a necessity that they should do so. To sit apart in a room unobserved with Charley once at least in the evening would be almost her duty; and then—with nothing to disturb them, no occasion for self-restraint—Gussy thought of this with a thrill through her veins yet with a sigh. She was becoming weary. All this had gone on for so long, and it looked as if it might go on forever without change.