CHAPTER IX.
[BETWEEN FRIENDS].
There is considerable monotony in seaside life, but it is monotony of a different kind from the everyday existence of the rest of the year; and in this complete change its principal charm and benefit consist. The home-life of a number of households is laid aside for the time, and the heterogeneous elements are thrown for the moment into a larger whole, forming an unstable compound--a salad of humanity where the sweets, the sours, and the bitters find themselves in new combinations with one another, and united for the time in a sauce piquante of fresh air and idleness. There can be no great variety in the occupations; picnics, excursions, drives, rides, walks, form an ever-recurring ditto, to which the unaccustomedness alone gives flavour.
There is rest for the workers, and society for the home-keeping, but genuine delight only for the very young, whose gregarious instincts are still unblunted, and who find in the presence of one another the exhilaration of spreading their callow wings in early flights.
For the mother-birds, however, there is anxiety. In this larger poultry-yard their chicks grow wilder than they have ever known them before. The broods get mixed, and wander into undreamt-of mischief, pullets consorting with cockerels of another breed, chickens with ducklings venturing into the water, while Dame Partlet clucks and flutters about, pecking and distracted.
Mrs Naylor sat fidgeting and restless among the matrons who presided over and superintended the enjoyments of their youthful charges. Lucy was causing her anxiety. "Who was that tall man she was dancing with?--dancing not for the first time or the second, but the third time without a break. And how unnecessarily intimate they appeared! Could she not fan herself if she felt warm, when they stopped for breath?--instead of letting an awkward stranger raise tempests which were blowing her hair into unsightly confusion, and making her so needlessly conspicuous." If a gentleman was warranted "nice," she did not object to his paying attention to her girls, but she wanted assurance of the niceness. She leant over to the nearest neighbour who seemed at leisure to answer her inquiries, and with whom, being a stranger, she would not compromise herself, whatever might be said.
The neighbour was Miss Maida Springer, a damsel scarcely any longer young, seeing her thirtieth birthday would be her next, who hovered on the confines of the dance, and looked hungrily after young men leading other maidens out, and wondering why no one came for her. She sat under the wing of an elder as lonely as herself--the widow Denwiddie, who varied the sober tenor of her life by spending a fortnight each summer among the gaieties and dissipations by the sea. She was bidding the widow observe things curious in the whirling crowd of dancers as they passed.
"See that great thing in pink," she had said last. "Positively stout. And what a colour for a large woman to wear! If it had been black, now, or blue, or even white----" and she glanced down approvingly at her own blue and white washed muslin. "Just watch the slow revolving heap. Ain't she like an iceberg out at sea, growing pink in the setting sun? And her poor little bit of a partner, racing to get round her on time! My! mustn't he feel warm! He reminds me of an ant trying to carry home a seed of wheat. Why don't he choose a slim one like himself?" and she ran her eye down her own spare form, which was certainly as slim as the absence of superfluous tissue could make it, with spider-like arms and wrists which would not be kept out of sight,--thinking how much freer the gentleman would have felt in the clasp of these slender tendrils.
"Look at that one's feet. Well, I never! What a size! I wonder how she can venture to stand up and dance. Ain't it good for the beetles they ain't none of them here?" and then, by a strange coincidence, a pair of number-one shoes stole out in front to show themselves--things small and narrow, on which it seemed wonderful that a human being could stand. But then a few bones can be packed away in very little room.
"Will you kindly tell me," asked Mrs Naylor, "who is that gentleman by the wall, with a lady's fan in his hand?--the one with the limp hair, brushed up so strangely above his forehead."