“Sorry we shocked you, Van. Forgot it was your lecture season! But I’ll taut the curb on the boys, so socket your whip, old fel!”
“If your tact kept pace with your slang, Upton, what a success you’d be!” Van Morris answered, carelessly. “’Tis a real pity you let the stable monopolize so much of the time that would make you an ornament to society.” Then he set down his unfinished glass, sauntered into the hall, and approached the subject of discussion.
Miss Rose Wood was scarcely a beauty; nor was she the youngest belle of that ball by perhaps fifteen seasons of German cotillion. But she had tact to her manicured finger-tips, delicate acid on her tongue’s tip, and that dangerous erudition, a brief biography of every girl in the set, was handily stored in her capacious memory. She had, moreover, a staunch following of gilt-plated youths who, being really afraid of her, made her a belle as a sort of social Peter’s pence.
Miss Wood had just finished a rapid “glide,” when she came under fire of the punch-room light-fighters; but, though Mr. Upton had once judged her “a trifle touched in the wind,” her complexion and her tasteful drapery had come equally smooth out of that trying ordeal. Even that critic finished with a nod towards her as their mentor moved away:
“She does keep her pace well! Hasn’t turned a hair.” And he was right in the fact so peculiarly stated; for it was less the warmth of the dancing-room than of her partner’s urgence, that brought Miss Rose Wood into the hall, for what Mr. Upton called “a breather.”
The visible members of the Wood family were two, Miss Rose and her father, Colonel Westchester Wood. “The Colonel” was an equally familiar figure at the clubs and on the quarter-stretch; nor was he chary of acceptance of the cards to dinners, balls, and opera-boxes, which his daughter’s facile management brought to the twain in showers. He had a certain military air, and a nebulous military history; boasted of his Virginia-Kentucky origin, and more than hinted at his Blue Grass stock-farm. Late at night, he would mistily mention “My regiment at Shiloh, sah!” But, as he was reputed even more expert with the pistol than most knew him to be with cards, geography and chronology were never insisted on in 174 detail. But the Colonel was undisputed possessor of a thirst, marvellous in its depth and continuity; and he had also a cast-iron head that turned the flanks of the most direct assaults of alcohol, and scattered them to flaunt the red flag on his pendulous nose, or to skirmish over his scrupulously shaven cheeks.
Of the invisible members of “the Colonel’s” household, fleecy rumors only pervaded society at intervals. The social Stanleys and Livingstons who had essayed the sources of the Wood family stream in its dark continent of brown-faced brick, on a quiet avenue, sent back vague stories of a lovely and patient invalid, and a more lovely and equally patient young girl, mother and sister to Miss Rose. There was a misty legend sometimes floating around the clubs, that “the Colonel,” after the method of Cleopatra, had dissolved his wife’s fortune in a posset, and swallowed it years before. But again the reputation of a dead shot cramped curiosity.
And a similar mist sometimes pervaded five o’clock teas and reunions chez la modiste, to the effect that the younger sister was but as a Midianite to the elder, while the mother was dying of neglect. But as neither subject of this gossip was in society, the mist never condensed into direction.
Society found Miss Rose Wood a peculiarly useful and pleasant person; and it took her—as “the Colonel” took many of his pleasures—on trust.