It was good to see so much joy in the home he had made for the children whose sorrows had been so many and so real. But as the evening grew old and the crowd thickened, his cheerfulness flagged. Perhaps he was merely fatigued with the outgo of welcome, sickened by having to say and hear the same things so many times.
But he saw the picnic becoming a revel. The dancers, whether waltzing or polking, seemed to increase in audacity, in blind or shameless abandonment to thoughts and moods that belonged to solitude if anywhere.
As he wandered about he surprised couples stealing embraces or kisses slily, or whispering guiltily, laughing with more than mischief. Sometimes it was Immy that he encountered; sometimes Keith.
What could he say or do? Nothing but pretend to be sightless and guileless.
When the supper hour was reached, the rush was incredible. Men made a joke of the crassest behavior, and a chivalric pretense that they were fighting for refreshment to carry to their fainting ladies. But it was neither humorous nor knightly to spill oyster soup over a lace dress, to tilt ice cream down a broadcloth back, or to grind fallen custard into the expensive carpet.
It was not pretty to empty the dregs of somebody’s else champagne into the oyster tureen or under the table, and while refilling the glass let the wine froth all over the table cover.
Many of the squires forgot their dames and drank themselves into states of truculence, or, worse, of odious nausea. RoBards had to convey two young gentlemen of better family than breeding up to the hatroom to sleep off their liquor; and he had to ask some of the soberer youth to help him run one sudden fiend out to the sidewalk and into a carriage.
While RoBards was spreading one of his young guests out on a bed upstairs, another knocked over the cutglass punch-bowl and cracked it irretrievably, together with a dozen engraved straw-stem glasses Patty’s father had left to her.
When the German began at about midnight some of the men dared to carry champagne bottles with them and set them down by their chairs for reference during the pauses in the figures.
Hosts and hostesses were supposed to ignore the misconduct of their guests, but it made RoBards’ blood run cold to see Immy go from the arms of a decent respectful sober youth into the arms and the liquorous embrace of a drunken faun whom she had to support.