Pelleas and I waited fearfully over the drawing-room fire, dreading her appearance at the door to say her good-night; for to our minds every chair and fixture was signaling a radiant “Party! Party!” like a clarion. But she thrust in her old face, nodded, and safely withdrew and we heard the street door close. Thereupon we got upstairs at a perilous pace and I had on the white gown in a twinkling while Pelleas, his hands trembling, made ready too.
I hardly looked in the mirror for the roses had yet to be arranged. I gathered them in my arms and Pelleas followed me down, and as we entered the drawing-room I felt his arm about my waist.
“Etarre,” he said. “Look, Etarre.”
He led me to the great gilt-framed cheval glass set in its shadowy corner. I looked, since he was determined to have me.
I remembered her so well, that other I who forty-nine years ago had stood before her mirror dressed for the Selby-Whitford ball. The brown hair of the girl whom I remembered was piled high on her head and fastened with a red rose; the fine lace lay about her throat and fell upon her arms, and the folds of the silk touched and lifted over a petticoat of lawn and lace. And here was the white gown and here the petticoat and tucker, and my hair which is quite white was piled high and held its one rose. The white roses in my arms and in my hair were like ghosts of the red ones that I had carried at that other ball—but I was no ghost! For as I looked at Pelleas and saw his dear face shining I knew that I was rather the happy spirit risen from the days when roses were not white, but merely red.
Pelleas stooped to kiss me, stooped just enough to make me stand on tiptoe as he always does, and then the door-bell rang.
“Pelleas!” I scolded, “and the roses not arranged.”
“You know you wanted to,” said Pelleas, shamelessly. And the truth of this did not in the least prevent my contradicting it.
Sally Chartres and Wilfred came first, Sally talking high and fast as of old. Such a dear little old lady as Sally is. I can hardly write her down “old lady” without a smile at the hyperbole, for though she is more than seventy and is really Madame Sarah Chartres, she knows and I know the jest and that she is just Sally all the time.
She threw off her cloak in the middle of the floor, her pearl earrings and necklace bobbing and ticking. At sight of her blue gown, ruffled to the waist and laced with black velvet, I threw my arms about her and we almost laughed and cried together; for we both remembered how, before she was sure that Wilfred loved her, she had spent the night with me after a ball and had sat by the window until dawn, in that very blue frock, weeping in my arms because Wilfred had danced so often with Polly Cleatam. And now here was Wilfred looking as if he had had no thought but Sally all his days.