She went to the dining room and looked over the lavish supper and summoned in her guests, and after the riotous meal she started the dance with ’Rome Ojeda, and she was dancing with him for the fourth time in an hour when her aunt came into the room and called her.
Mrs. Featherstone told her that she was annoyed beyond words, but this seemed hardly a correct statement of her case, as she proceeded to emit sharp staccato showers of them. She called her niece among other things a heartless young savage and asked her what she thought of herself, eating and dancing and flirting like that, when her sweetheart was sick and suffering. Ginger, as a matter of fact, thought very well of herself that evening; she was as hard and bright as polished metal and no more tender. Presently—in the morning, perhaps—she would be wretchedly aware of the crudeness and cruelty of her attitude; now she was unyielding.
“Oh, does he want to see me?” She shrugged, and when she did that she was all Valdés. Dean Wolcott would have been reminded of a Goya painting, but Aunt Fan was too angry to be reminded of anything.
“Of course he wants to see you! Why shouldn’t he?”
“Did he ask you to bring me?” Her eyes were fathomless.
“No, he didn’t; he has too much pride, of course, but——”
“Pride!” said Ginger, bitterly. “I shouldn’t think he’d have much pride left, after to-day!”
“Now, that just shows how childish and ridiculous your standards are,” her aunt scolded. “Just because he happens not to be able to ride like a buckeroo—because he’s lived a different sort of life——”
“You don’t understand,” said Ginger. Her voice was adamant, too. “You don’t understand at all. Well—I’ll see him, for a minute.” She nodded to a hovering partner and went down the long corridor to Aleck’s room. Her aunt did not understand and she did not understand herself, all that was swaying her. It wasn’t alone that her lover had cut a sorry figure on horseback; it was that she, Ginger McVeagh, feudal lady of the range, princess of the blood in the eyes of her henchmen, had said, in effect—“There is no one among you all fit to be my mate; I must have a stranger, an easterner, some one higher and finer. Now I have found him! Wait until you see him—wait, and behold why I have chosen him.” They had waited and they had beheld, and now, she knew, for all their civility about it and their good-natured inquiries about him they were amused and amazed that she should have picked Dean Wolcott; they were aghast, as she was aghast.
Old Manuela was seated beside the bed but she rose at once and waddled out into the hall. She had been waiting and watching anxiously for her mistress for an hour, and she was sure, in her simple heart, that everything would be all right now.