She stood alone, terribly shy, her smooth cheeks flushing scarlet, and her bright eyes searching timidly for some friendly corner where she could run and hide herself away for the rest of the evening. Without Alma beside her to be petted and protected, she looked almost pathetically just what she was—a modest young girl, who was peculiarly lovely and appealing, as she stood waiting with a beating heart to catch a friendly eye in all that terrible, gay, selfish throng of pleasure-seekers.
CHAPTER V
A RETICENT GENTLEMAN—AND MISS BANCROFT
With only the one aim of getting to harbor by hook or crook, Nancy, her cheeks burning with shyness, edged her way along the wall. She would not have felt half so much alone if she had been dropped into the middle of the Sahara desert, and, while her little feet tingled with the rhythm of the music, she surrendered herself to the unhappy conviction that she was doomed to be a wall-flower.
She did not know these people; she felt as if she could never know them. Everything in their manner, their speech and their dress suggested a foreignness to her own nature that could never be bridged, unless she herself changed and became another being. It was something that she could not define, this difference; it was simply something that grew out of a different way of thinking and feeling about life. All these people seemed to make pleasure their business, the most important purpose of their existence, and this attitude, expressed in the very way that the girls carried themselves, in the tones of their voices, in their light scraps of inconsequential and not very clever talk, made her feel strange beyond description.
She stood near a group of palms under the arch of the staircase, watching the faces all about her, longing one minute to be at home, curled up with a book on her shabby, comfortable window-seat, and the next, that she might be drawn into the centre of all that bubbling, companionable enjoyment. Now she caught a glimpse of Alma, who was standing near the door of the dancing-room, bantering and coquetting with a little cluster of youths who had gathered about her, heaven knows where from or how, like flies about a jar of new honey; it was plainly Alma's natural environment, in which she revelled like a joyous young fish in a sunny pool.
"So that pretty little creature is George Prescott's daughter?" The question, spoken in a rather deep and penetrating voice, carried clearly to Nancy's ears, and she turned. At a little distance from her, seated on a small couch, sat Mrs. Porterbridge, a lean woman with a tight-lipped, aquiline face, and painfully thin neck and arms, and the old lady who had put the question. A quite remarkable-looking old lady, Nancy thought, enormously fat, dressed in purple velvet, her huge, dimpled arms and shoulders billowing, out of it, like the whipped cream on top of some titanic confection. Two small, plump, tapering hands clasped a handsome feather fan against her almost perpendicular lap. Two generous chins completely obliterated any outward evidences of neck, so that her head seemed to have been set upon her shoulders with the naïve simplicity of a dough-man's; yet for all this, one glance at her keen, intelligent face, with its sleepy, twinkling eyes and humorous, witty mouth, was enough to assure one that, whoever she might be, she was not an ordinary old lady by any means. One guessed at once that she had seen much of the world in her sixty-five or seventy years, that she had enjoyed every moment of the entertainment, and that while she probably required everyone else to respect public opinion, she felt comfortably privileged to disregard it herself whenever she pleased. She had been busily discussing everyone who attracted her attention, disdaining to lower her sonorous voice or to conceal in any way the fact that she was gossiping briskly. Young and old alike hastened up to her to pay their respects, and it was evident from their manner of eager deference that she was a rather important old person, whose keen and fearless tongue made her good opinion worth gaining.
At present she had centred her lively interest upon Alma, and Nancy could not resist the temptation of listening to her remarks, especially since the old lady was obviously perfectly willing to let anyone and everyone hear her who might have reason to listen.
"That is little Alma Prescott," Mrs. Porterbridge was replying. "She is charmingly pretty, isn't she?"