"Just you wait. 'Shh!"
Then Emma came down the stairs like a slowly swooping angel.
She had seemed a princess in her traveling-togs; in her evening gown—! Orson had not seen such a gown since he had been in Paris. He imagined this girl poised on the noble stairway of the Opéra there. Em came floating down upon these small-town girls with this fabric from heavenly looms, and reduced them once for all to a chorus.
But there was no scorn in her manner and no humility in her welcome. The Carthage girls frankly gave her her triumph, yet when she reached the foot of the stairs and the waiting Arthur she murmured something that broke the spell. The crowd rippled with suppressed amusement. Arthur flushed.
Orson was again too remote to hear. But he could feel the wave of derision, and he could see the hot shame on Arthur's cheeks. Emma bent low for her train, took Arthur's arm, and disappeared into the parlor where the dancing had begun.
Orson felt his arm pinched, and turned to find Tudie looking at him. "This is our dance," she said, "unless you'd rather dance with her."
"With her? With Miss Terriberry, you mean?"
"Naturally. You were staring at her so hard I thought your eyes would roll out on the floor."
There was only one way to quell this mutiny, and that was to soothe it away. He caught Tudie in his arms. It was strenuous work bumping about in that little parlor, and collisions were incessant, but he wooed Tudie as if they were afloat in interstellar spaces.
They collided oftenest with Arthur and his Emma, for the lucky youth who held that drifting nymph seemed most unhappy in his pride. The girl was talking amiably, but the man was grim and furtive and as careless of his steering as a tipsy chauffeur.