“I want to introduce you to my cousin over yonder,” she said, getting rid of a minute Brazilian under-secretary, and putting her hand on Dan's arm to direct him: “Mrs. Justice Averill.”
Miss Van Hook, keeping her look of severe vigilance, really followed her energetic niece, who took the lead, as a young lady must whenever she and her chaperon meet on equal terms.
Mrs. Justice Averill, who was from the far West somewhere, received Dan with the ease of the far East, and was talking London and Paris to him before the end of the third minute. It gave Dan a sense of liberation, of expansion; he filled his lungs with the cosmopolitan air in a sort of intoxication; without formulating it, he felt, with the astonishment which must always attend the Bostonian's perception of the fact, that there is a great social life in America outside of Boston. At Campobello he had thought Miss Anderson a very jolly girl, bright, and up to all sorts of things; but in the presence of the portable Boston there he could not help regarding her with a sort of tolerance which he now blushed for; he thought he had been a great ass. She seemed to know all sorts of nice people, and she strove with generous hospitality to make him have a good time. She said it was Cabinet Day, and that all the secretaries' wives were receiving, and she told him he had better make the rounds with them. He assented very willingly, and at six o'clock he was already so much in the spirit of this free and simple society, so much opener and therefore so much wiser than any other, that he professed a profound disappointment with the two or three Cabinet ladies whose failure to receive brought his pleasure to a premature close.
“But I suppose you're going to Mrs. Whittington's to-night!” Miss Anderson said to him, as they drove up to Wormley's, where she set him down. Miss Van Hook had long ceased to say anything; Dan thought her a perfect duenna. “You know you can go late there,” she added.
“No, I can't go at all,” said Dan. “I don't know them.”
“They're New England people,” urged Miss Anderson; as if to make him try to think that he was asked to Mrs. Whittington's.
“I don't know more than half the population of New England,” said Dan, with apparent levity, but real forlornness.
“If you'd like to go—if you're sure you've no other engagement—”
“Oh, I'm certain of that?”
“—we would come for you.”