"Which makes our outlook rather stormy, doesn't it?" she said, turning to him with all of her old sweet friendly manner. "Do let us agree, Duane. Mercy on us! we ought to adore each other—unless we have forgotten the quarrelsome but adorable friendship of our childhood. I thought you were the perfection of all boys."
"I thought there was no girl to equal you, Geraldine."
She turned audaciously, not quite knowing what she was saying:
"Think so now, Duane! It will be good for us both."
"Do you mean it?"
"Not—seriously," she said.... "And, Duane, please don't be too serious with me. I am—you make me uncertain—you make me uncomfortable. I don't know just what to say to you or just how it will be taken. You mustn't be—that way—with me; you won't, will you?"
He was silent for a moment; then his face lighted up. "No," he said, laughing; "I'll open another can of platitudes.... You're a dear to forgive me."
Dancing had been general before the cotillion; débutantes continued to arrive in shoals from other dinners, a gay, rosy, eager throng, filling drawing-rooms, conservatory, and library with birdlike flutter and chatter, overflowing into the breakfast-room, banked up on the stairs in bright-eyed battalions.
The cotillion, led by Jack Dysart dancing alone, was one of those carefully thought out intellectual affairs which shakes New York society to its intellectual foundations.
In one figure Geraldine came whizzing into the room in a Palm Beach tricycle-chair trimmed with orchids and propelled by Peter Tappan; and from her seat amid the flowers she distributed favours—live white cockatoos, clinging, flapping, screeching on gilded wands; fans spangled with tiny electric jewels; parasols of pink silk set with incandescent lights; crystal cages containing great, pale-green Luna moths alive and fluttering; circus hoops of gilt filled with white tissue paper, through which the men jumped.