Miss Willie Lillieblade sighed and tapped with her staff.
“Pooh!” said she. “Old married folk always live in the past. I’m a young thing of seventy-four and I’ve learned to live in the present. Let’s dance. My neuralgia is coming back.”
We had the chairs away in a minute, and Pelleas summoned from the dining-room the musicians—a Danish lad with a mane of straight hair over his eyes and his equally Danish sister in a collarless loose wool frock. They struck into the Varsovienne with a will and at the sound my heart bounded; and, Pelleas having recalled to me the step when Nichola was not looking, I danced away with Wilfred as if I knew how to do nothing else. Pelleas danced with Miss Willie who kept her staff in her hand and would tap the floor at all the impertinent rests in the music, while Pelleas sang “tol” above everything. Polly insisted on dancing alone—I suspect because her little feet are almost as trim as when she wore one’s—and she lifted her poplin and sailed about among us. Sally kept her head prettily on one side for all the world as she used, though now her gray curls were bobbing. Horace, who suffers frightfully from gout, kept beside her at a famous pace and his eyes were quite triangular with pain. “Tol te tol te tol!” insisted Pelleas, with Miss Willie holding her hand to her neuralgia as she whirled. I looked down at the figures on the carpet gliding beneath my feet and for one charmed moment, with the lilt of the music in my blood, I could have been certain that now was not now, but then!
This lasted, as you may imagine, somewhat less than three minutes. Breathless we sank down one by one, though Sally and Pelleas, now together and now alone, outdanced us all until we dreaded to think what the morrow held for them both. Miss Lillieblade was on her knees by the fire trying to warm her painful cheek on an andiron knob and laughing at every one. Polly with flushed face and tumbled hair was crying out: “O, but stop, Sally!” and “Pray be careful!” and fanning herself with an unframed water-colour that had been knocked from the mantel. We all knew for that matter that we would have to pay, but then we paid anyway. If one has to have gout and attendant evils one may as well make them a fair exchange for innocent pleasure instead of permitting them to be mere usury. Pelleas said that afterward.
Sally suddenly laughed aloud.
“They think that we have to be helped up and down steps!” she said blithely.
We caught her meaning and joined in her laugh at the expense of a world that fancies us to have had our day.
“If we liked,” said Miss Lillieblade, “I have no doubt we could meet here every night when no one was looking, and be our exact selves of the Selby-Whitford ball.”
Horace smiled across at Polly.
“Who would read them to sleep with fairy stories?” he demanded.