At her elbow, Henry moved through the crowd in the front hall. He felt cool eyes on him. He stood very straight and stiff. He was pale. He bowed to the various girls and fellows—Mary, Martha, Herb, Elbow, and the rest, with reserve. It was, from moment to moment, a battle.
Nobody but Madame Watt would have thought of giving such a party. It was so expensive—the dinner for twenty-two, to begin with; then all the railway fares; a bus from the station in Chicago to the theatre and back. The theatre tickets alone came to thirty-three dollars (these were the less expensive days of the dollar and a half seat). Sunbury still, at the time, was inclined to look doubtfully on ostentation.
You felt, too, in the case of Madame, that she was likely to speak, at any moment rather—well, broadly. All that Paris experience, whatever it was, seemed to be hovering about the snapping black eyes and the indomitable mouth. You sensed in her none of the reserve of movement, of speech, of mind, that were implied in the feminine standards of Sunbury. Yet she was unquestionably a person. If she laughed louder than the ladies of Sunbury, she had more to say.
To-night she was a dominantly entertaining hostess. She talked of the theatre, in Paris, London and New York—of the Coquelins, Gallipaux, Bernhardt, of Irving and Terry and Willard and Grossmith. Some of these she had met. She knew Sothem, it appeared. Even the extremely worldly Elbow and Herb were impressed.
She had Henry at her right. Boldly placed him there. At his right was a girl from Omaha who was visiting the Smiths and who made several efforts to be pleasant to the pale gloomy youth with the little moustache and the distinctly interesting gray-blue eyes.
By the time they were settled on the train Henry found himself grateful to the certainly strong, however coarse-fibred woman.
Efforts to identify her as she seemed now, with the woman of that hideous scene with the Senator brought only bewilderment. He had to give it up.
This woman was rapidly winning his confidence; even, in a curious sense, his sympathy.
At the farther end of the table the little Senator, all dignity and calm stilted sentences, made himself remotely agreeable to several girls at once.
At one side of the table sat Cicely, in lacy white with a wonderful little gauzy scarf about her shoulders. She looked at him only now and then, and just as she looked at the others. He wondered how she could smile so brightly.