smiling lip twitched a little threateningly, as she concluded the silent monologue. “I suppose she thinks I ought to be glad enough she asked Walter!”
Walter was, in fact, rather noticeable. He was not Mildred’s only guest to wear a short coat and to appear without gloves; but he was singular (at least in his present surroundings) on account of a kind of coiffuring he favoured, his hair having been shaped after what seemed a Mongol inspiration. Only upon the top of the head was actual hair perceived, the rest appearing to be nudity. And even more than by any difference in mode he was set apart by his look and manner, in which there seemed to be a brooding, secretive and jeering superiority and this was most vividly expressed when he felt called upon for his loud, short, lopsided laugh. Whenever he uttered it Alice laughed, too, as loudly as she could, to cover it.
“Well,” he said. “How long we goin’ to stand here? My feet are sproutin’ roots.”
Alice took his arm, and they began to walk aimlessly through the rooms, though she tried to look as if they had a definite destination, keeping her eyes eager and her lips parted;—people had called jovially to them from the distance, she meant to imply, and they were going to join these merry friends. She was still upon this ghostly errand when a furious outbreak of drums and saxophones sounded a prelude for the second dance.
Walter danced with her again, but he gave her a warning. “I don’t want to leave you high and dry,” he told her, “but I can’t stand it. I got to get somewhere I don’t haf’ to hurt my eyes with these berries; I’ll go blind if I got to look at any more of ‘em. I’m goin’ out to smoke as soon as the music begins the next time, and you better get fixed for it.”
Alice tried to get fixed for it. As they danced she nodded sunnily to every man whose eye she caught, smiled her smile with the under lip caught between her teeth; but it was not until the end of the intermission after the dance that she saw help coming.
Across the room sat the globular lady she had encountered that morning, and beside the globular lady sat a round-headed, round-bodied girl; her daughter, at first glance. The family contour was also as evident a characteristic of the short young man who stood in front of Mrs. Dowling, engaged with her in a discussion which was not without evidences of an earnestness almost impassioned. Like Walter, he was declining to dance a third time with sister; he wished to go elsewhere.
Alice from a sidelong eye watched the controversy: she saw the globular young man glance toward her, over his shoulder; whereupon Mrs. Dowling, following this glance, gave Alice a look of open fury, became much more vehement in the argument, and even struck her knee with a round, fat fist for emphasis.
“I’m on my way,” said Walter. “There’s the music startin’ up again, and I told you–-“
She nodded gratefully. “It’s all right—but come back before long, Walter.”
The globular young man, red with annoyance, had torn himself from his family and was hastening across the room to her. “C’n I have this dance?”
“Why, you nice Frank Dowling!” Alice cried. “How lovely!”
CHAPTER VII
They danced. Mr. Dowling should have found other forms of exercise and pastime.
Nature has not designed everyone for dancing, though sometimes those she has denied are the last to discover her niggardliness. But the round young man was at least vigorous enough—too much so, when his knees collided with Alice’s—and he was too sturdy to be thrown off his feet, himself, or to allow his partner to fall when he tripped her. He held her up valiantly, and continued to beat a path through the crowd of other dancers by main force.
He paid no attention to anything suggested by the efforts of the musicians, and appeared to be unaware that there should have been some connection between what they were doing and what he was doing; but he may have listened to other music of his own, for his expression was of high content; he seemed to feel no doubt whatever that he was dancing. Alice kept as far away from him as under the circumstances she could; and when they stopped she glanced down, and found the execution of unseen manoeuvres, within the protection of her skirt, helpful to one of her insteps and to the toes of both of her slippers.
Her cheery partner was paddling his rosy brows with a fine handkerchief. “That was great!” he said. “Let’s go out and sit in the corridor; they’ve got some comfortable chairs out there.”
“Well—let’s not,” she returned. “I believe I’d rather stay in here and look at the crowd.”
“No; that isn’t it,” he said, chiding her with a waggish forefinger. “You think if you go out there you’ll miss a chance of someone else asking you for the next dance, and so you’ll have to give it to me.”
“How absurd!” Then, after a look about her that revealed nothing encouraging, she added graciously, “You can have the next if you want it.”
“Great!” he exclaimed, mechanically. “Now let’s get out of here—out of THIS room, anyhow.”
“Why? What’s the matter with–-“
“My mother,” Mr. Dowling explained. “But don’t look at her. She keeps motioning me to come and see after Ella, and I’m simply NOT going to do it, you see!”
Alice laughed. “I don’t believe it’s so much that,” she said, and consented to walk with him to a point in the next room from which Mrs. Dowling’s continuous signalling could not be seen. “Your mother hates me.”
“Oh, no; I wouldn’t say that. No, she don’t,” he protested, innocently. “She don’t know you more than just to speak to, you see. So how could she?”
“Well, she does. I can tell.”
A frown appeared upon his rounded brow. “No; I’ll tell you the way she feels. It’s like this: Ella isn’t TOO popular, you know—it’s hard to see why, because she’s a right nice girl, in her way—and mother thinks I ought to look after her, you see. She thinks I ought to dance a whole lot with her myself, and stir up other fellows to dance with her—it’s simply impossible to make mother understand you CAN’T do that, you see. And then about me, you see, if she had her way I wouldn’t get to dance with anybody at all except girls like Mildred Palmer and Henrietta Lamb. Mother wants to run my whole programme for me, you understand, but the trouble of it is—about girls like that, you see well, I couldn’t do what she wants, even if I wanted to myself, because you take those girls, and by the time I get Ella off my hands for a minute, why, their dances are always every last one taken, and where do I come in?”
Alice nodded, her amiability undamaged. “I see. So that’s why you dance with me.”
