“Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they wouldn't do it.” Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting.
“We're going to do something exciting,” Carol exclaimed to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his “stunt” about the Norwegian catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of “An Old Sweetheart of Mine,” and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark Antony's oration.
“But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house,” she whispered to Miss Sherwin.
“That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?”
“Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!”
“See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor dear——Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do something fine.”
Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned the planners of “stunts,” “We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon. You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage tonight.”
While Raymie blushed and admitted, “Oh, they don't want to hear me,” he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his vest.
In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to “discover artistic talent,” Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital.
Raymie sang “Fly as a Bird,” “Thou Art My Dove,” and “When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest,” all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor.