In came Polly Cleatam herself presently in her old silk poplin trimmed with fringe, and her dimples were as deep as on the day of her elopement. Polly was nineteen when she eloped on the evening of her début party with Horace who was not among the guests. And the sequel is of the sort that should be suppressed, but I must tell it, being a very truthful old woman and having once or twice assisted at an elopement myself: They are very happy. Polly is an adorable old lady; she has been a grandmother for nineteen years, and the Offence is Lisa’s best friend. But whereas Sally and I have no idea of our own age Polly, since her elopement, has rebounded into a Restraining Influence. That often happens. I think that the severest-looking women I know have eloped and have come to think twice of everything else. Polly with an elopement behind her is invariably the one to say “Hush,” and “I wouldn’t.”
Miss Willie Lillieblade was late. She came in wound in costly furs—Heaven provided her bank account in the neuter gender—and she stood revealed in a gorgeous flowered gown, new, but quite like the one which she had worn at the very ball that we were celebrating. Miss Lillieblade is tiny, and though her hair is quite white she seems to have taken on none of the graces of age. She has grown old like an expensive India-rubber ball, retaining some of her elasticity and constantly suggesting her former self instead of becoming another article altogether. She has adopted caps, not soft, black, old-lady caps, but perky little French affairs of white. She is erect—and she walks with a tall white staff, silver-headed, the head being filled with two kinds of pills though few know about that.
I fancy that we were in great contrast; for Miss Lillieblade is become a fairy-godmother-looking old lady; Polly Cleatam has taken on severity and poise and has conquered all obstacles save her dimples; Sally has developed into a grande dame of old lace and Roman mosaic pins; and I look for all the world like the plump grandmothers that they paint on calendars.
Pelleas and Wilfred and Horace talked us over.
“Ah, well now,” said Wilfred, “they look not a day older than when we were married, and Miss Willie is younger than any one.”
Wilfred, who used to be slim and bored, is a plump, rosy old gentleman interested in everything to the point—never beyond—of curiosity. O these youthful poses of languor and faint surprise, how they exchange themselves in spite of themselves for the sterling coin!
Horace beamed across at Polly—Horace is a man of affairs in Nassau Street and his name is conjured with as the line between his eyes would lead one to suspect; yet his eyes twinkled quite as they used before the line was there.
“Polly,” he begged, “may I call you ‘Polly’ to-night? I’ve been restricted to ‘Penelope,’” he explained, “ever since our Polly was born. Then after her coming out she demanded the Penelope, and I went back to the Polly I preferred. But now our Polly-Penelope is forty, and there is a little seminary Polly who is Polly too, though I dare say the mite may rebuke us any day for undue familiarity. May I say ‘Polly’ now?”
Pelleas was smiling.
“I leave it to you,” he said generously to every one, “to say if Etarre’s hair was not white at our wedding? She has always looked precisely—but precisely!—the way she looks now.”