But it was over at last, and she hurried home. The dim stillness of the apartment was an invitation to rest, but she disregarded it, slipping out of her shirtwaist and splashing her face and bare arms with cold water. A new chiffon blouse was waiting in its box, and a thrill of anticipation ran through her when she lifted it from its tissue wrappings.
She fastened the soft folds, pleased by the lines of her round arms seen through the transparency, and her slender neck rising from white frills. In the hand-glass she gazed at the oval of her face reflected in the dressing-table mirror, and suddenly lifting her lids caught the surprising effect of the sea-gray eyes beneath black lashes, an effect she had never known until Louise spoke of it.
She was pretty. She was almost—she caught her breath—beautiful. The knowledge was more than beauty itself, for it brought self-assurance. She felt equal to any situation the evening might offer, and she was smiling at herself in the mirror when Louise burst in, a picture in a dashing little serge suit and a hat whose black line was like the stroke of an artist’s pencil.
“The alimony’s come!” she cried. “We’re going to have a regular time! Momma’ll meet us down town. Look, isn’t it stunning?” She displayed the longed-for lavallière twinkling against her smooth young neck. “I knew I’d get it somehow. Momma—the stingy thing!—she went and got her new furs. But we met Bob, and he bought it for me.” She sat down before the mirror, throwing off her hat and letting down her hair. “I don’t know—it’s only a chip diamond.” Her moods veered as swiftly as light summer breezes. “I wish momma’d get me a real one. It’s nonsense, her treating me like a baby. I’m seventeen.”
Helen felt her delight in the new waist evaporate. Louise’s chatter always made her feel at a disadvantage. There was a distance between them that they seemed unable to bridge, and Helen realized that it was her fault. Perhaps it was because she had been so long alone that she often felt even more lonely when she was with Louise.
The sensation returned, overpowering, when they joined the crowd in the restaurant. She could only follow Louise’s insouciant progress through a bewildering medley of voices, music, brilliant lights, and stumble into a chair at a table ringed with strange faces. Momma was there, her hat dripping with plumes, white furs flung negligently over her shoulders, her fingers a blaze of rings. There was another resplendent woman, named Nell Allan; a bald-headed fat man called Bob; a younger man, with a lean face and restless blue eyes, hailed by Louise as Duddy. They were having a very gay time, but Helen, shrinking unnoticed in her chair, was unaccountably isolated and lonely. She could think of nothing to say. There was no thread in the rapid chatter at which she could clutch. They were all talking, and every phrase seemed a flash of wit, since they all laughed so much.
“I love the cows and chickens, but this is the life!” Duddy cried at intervals. “Oh, you chickens!” and “This is the life!” the others responded in a chorus of merriment. Helen did not doubt that it all meant something, but her wits were too slow to grasp it, and the talk raced on unintelligibly. She could only sit silent eating delicate food from plates that waiters whisked into place and whisked away again, and laughing uncertainly when the others did.
Color and light and music beat upon her brain. About her was a confusion of movement, laughter, clinking glasses, glimpses of white shoulders and red lips, perfumes, hurrying waiters, steaming dishes, and over and through it all the quick, accented rhythm of the music, swaying, dominating, blending all sensations into one quickening vibration.
Suddenly, from all sides, hidden in the artificial foliage that covered the walls, silvery bells took up the melody. Helen, inarticulate and motionless, felt her nerves tingle, alive, joyful, eager.
There was a pushing back of chairs, and she started. But they were only going to dance. Duddy and momma, Bob and Mrs. Allan, swept out into a whirl of white arms and dark coats, tilted faces and swaying bodies. “Isn’t it lovely!” Helen murmured.
But Louise was not listening. She sat mutinous, her fingers tapping time to the music, her eyes beneath the long lashes searching the room. “I can’t help it. I just got to dance!” she muttered, and suddenly she was gone. Someone met her among the tables, put his arms around her, and whirled her away. Helen, watching for her black hat and happy face to reappear, saw that she was dancing with the man whose telegram had introduced them. Memory finally gave her his name. Gilbert Kennedy.
Louise brought him to the table when the music ceased. There were gay introductions, and Helen wished that she could say something. But momma monopolized him, squeezing in an extra chair for him beside her, and saying how glad she was to meet a friend of her little girl’s.
Helen could only be silent, listening to their incomprehensible gaiety, and feeling an attraction for him as irresistible as an electric current. She did not know what it was, but she thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen, and she felt that he did whatever he wanted to do with invariable success. He was not like the others. He talked their jargon, but he did not seem of them, and she noticed that his hazel eyes, set in a network of tiny wrinkles, were at once avid and weary. Yet he could not be older than twenty-eight or so. He danced with momma, when again the orchestra began a rag, but coming back to the table with the others, he said restlessly:
“Let’s go somewhere else. My
