The provision that for the moment he was to lead his customary life and
Rosie hers made it possible for Claude to attend the ball by which Mrs.
Darling drew the notice of the world to her daughter. He did so with
hesitations, compunctions, reluctances, and repugnances which in no wise
diminished his desire to be present at the event.
It took place in the great circular ball-room of the city's newest and
most splendid hotel. The ball-room itself was white-and-gold and Louis
Quinze. Against this background a tasteful decorator had constructed a
colonnade that reproduced in flowers the exquisite marble circle of the
Bosquet at Versailles. An imitation of Girardon's fountain splashed in
the center of the room and cooled the air.
Claude arrived late. He did so partly to compromise with his
compunctions and partly to accentuate his value. In gatherings at which
young men were sometimes at a premium none knew better than he the
heightened worth of one who sauntered in when no more were to be looked
for, and who carried himself with distinction. Handsome at any time,
Claude rose above his own levels when he was in evening dress. His
figure was made for a white waistcoat, his feet for dancing-pumps.
Moreover, he knew how to enter a room with that modesty which prompts a
hostess to be encouraging. As he stood rather timidly in the doorway,
long after the little receiving group had broken up, Mrs. Darling said
to herself that she had never seen a more attractive young man--whoever
he was!
She was glad afterward that she had made this reservation, for without
it she might have been prejudiced against him on learning that he was
Archie Masterman's son. As it was, she could feel that the sins of the
fathers were not to be visited on the children, especially in the case
of so delightful a lad. Mrs. Darling had an eye for masculine good
looks, particularly when they were accompanied by a suggestion of the
thoroughbred. Claude's very shyness--the gentlemanly hesitation which on
the threshold of a ball-room has no dandified airs of seeming too much
at ease--had this suggestion of the thoroughbred. Mrs. Darling, dragging
a long, pink train and waving slowly a bespangled pink fan, moved toward
him at once.
"How d'w do? So glad to see you! I'm afraid my daughter is dancing."
There was something in her manner that told him she had no idea who he
was--something that could be combined with polite welcome only by one
born to be a hostess.
Claude had that ready perception of his rôle which makes for social
success. He bowed with the right inclination, and spoke with a gravity
dictated by respect. "I'm afraid I must introduce myself, Mrs. Darling.
I'm so late. I'm Claude Masterman. My father is--"
"Oh, they're here! So lovely your mother looks! Really there's not a
young girl in the room can touch her. Won't you find some one and dance?
I'm sorry my daughter--But later on I'll find her and intro--Why,
Maidie, there you are! I thought you'd never come. How d'w do, dear?"
A more important guest than himself being greeted, Claude felt at
liberty to move on a pace or two and look over the scene. It was easy to
do this, for the outer rim of the circle, that which came beneath the
colonnade, was raised by two steps above the space reserved for dancing.
The _coup d'[oe]il_ was therefore extensive.
A mass of color, pleasing and confused, revolved languorously to those
strains of the Viennese operetta in which the waltz might be said to
have finished the autocracy of its long reign. The rhythm of the dancers
was as regular and gentle as the breathing of a child. In glide and
turn, in balance and smoothness, in that lift which was scarcely motion,
there was the suggestion of frenzy restrained, of passion lulled, which
emanates from the barely perceptible heave of a slumbering summer sea.
It was dreamy to a charm; it was graceful to the point at which the eye
begins to sicken of gracefulness; it was monotonous with the force of a
necromantic spell. It was soothing; it also threw a hint of melancholy
into a gathering intended to be gay. It was as though all that was most
sentimentally lovely in the essence of the nineteenth century had
concentrated its strength to subdue the daring spirit of the twentieth,
winning a decade of success. Now, however, that the decade was past,
there were indications of revolt. On the arc of the circle most remote
from the eye of the hostess audacious couples were giving way to bizarre
little dips and kicks and attitudes, named by outlandish names,
inaugurating a new freedom.
Claude stood alone beneath one of the wide, delicate floral arches--a
spectator who was not afraid of being observed. In reality he was noting
to himself the degree to which he had passed beyond the merely
pleasure-seeking impulse. In Rosie and Rosie's cares he had come to
realities. He was rather proud of it. With regard to the young men and
young women swirling in this variegated whirlpool, as well as to those
who, wearied with the dance, were sitting or reclining on the steps,
where rugs and cushions had been thrown for their convenience, he felt a
distinct superiority. They were still in the childish stage, while he
was grown to be a man. To the pretty girls, with their Parisian frocks
and their relatively idle lives, Rosie, with her power of tackling
actualities, was as a human being to a race of marionettes. It would be
necessary for him, in deference to his hosts, to step down among them in
a minute or two and twirl in their company; but he would do it with a
certain pity for those to whom this sort of thing was really a pastime;
he would do it as one for whom pastimes had lost their meaning and who
would be in some sense taking a farewell.
The music breathed out its last drowsy cadence, and the whirlpool
resolved itself into a series of shimmering, subsidiary eddies. There
was a decentralizing movement toward the rugs and cushions on the steps,
or to the seclusion of seats skilfully embowered amid groups of palms.
Dowagers sought the rose-colored settees against the walls. Gentlemen,
clasping their white-gloved hands at the base of their spinal columns,
bent in graceful conversational postures. A few pairs of attractive
young people continued to pace the floor. Claude remained where he was.
He remained where he was partly because he hadn't decided what else to
do, and partly because his quick eye had singled out the one girl in the
room who embodied something that was not embodied by every other girl.
When first he saw her she was standing beside the Girardon fountain in
conversation with a young man. The fact that the young man was his
friend Cheever brought her directly within Claude's circle and stirred
that spirit of emulation which five minutes earlier he thought he had
outlived. The girl was adjusting something in her corsage, her glance
flying upward from the action of her fingers toward Cheever's face, not
shyly or coquettishly, but with a perfectly straightforward nonchalance
which might have meant anything from indifference to defiance.
Claude knew the precise moment at which she noticed him by the fact that
she glanced toward him twice in rapid succession, after which Cheever
glanced toward him, too. He understood then that she had been
sufficiently struck by him to ask his name, and judged that Billy would
treat him to some such pardonable epithet as "awful ass," in order to
keep her attention on himself. In this apparently he didn't succeed, for
presently they began to saunter in Claude's direction. The latter stood
his ground.
In the knowledge that he could endure scrutiny, he stood his ground with
an ease that plainly roused the young lady's interest. With her hand on
the arm of her cavalier she sauntered forward, and, swerving slightly,
sauntered by. She sauntered by with a lingering look of curiosity that
seemed to throw him a challenge. Never in his life had Claude received
such a look. It was perhaps the characteristic look of the girl of the
twentieth century. It was neither bold nor rude nor self-assertive, but
it was unconscious, inquiring, and unabashed. For Claude it was a new
experience, calling out in him a new response.
It was a rule with Claude never to take the initiative with girls of his
own class, or with those who--because they lived in the city while he
lived in the village--felt themselves geographically his superiors. He
found it wise policy to wait to be sought, and therefore fell back
toward his hostess with compliments for her scheme of decoration. He got
the reward he hoped for when Mrs. Darling called to her daughter,
saying:
"Elsie dear, come here. I want to introduce Mr. Claude Masterman."
So it happened that when the nineteenth century was putting forth a
further effort with the swooning phrases of the barcarolle from the
"Contes d'Hoffmann," adapted to the Boston, Claude found himself swaying
with the twentieth.
They had not much to say. Whatever interest they felt in each other was
guarded, taciturn. When they talked it was in disjointed sentences on
fragmentary subjects.
"You've been abroad, haven't you?"
"Yes; for the last five years."
"Do you like being back?"
The answer was doubtful. "Rather. For some things." Then, as though to
explain this lack of enthusiasm, "Everybody looks alike." She qualified
this by adding, "You don't."
"Neither do you," he stated, in the matter-of-fact tone which he felt to
be suited to the piquantly matter-of-fact in her style.
It was a minute or two before either of them spoke again. "You've got a
brother, haven't you? My father's his guardian or something."
Assenting to these statements, Claude said further, "He couldn't come
to-night because he's going to be married on Thursday."
"To that Miss Willoughby, isn't it?" A jerky pause was followed by a
jerky addition: "I think she's nice."
"Yes, she is; top-hole. So's my brother."
She threw back her head to fling him up a smile that struck him as
adorably straightforward. "I like to hear one brother speak of another
like that. You don't often."
"Oh, well, every brother couldn't, you know."
They had circled and reversed more than once before she sighed: "I wish
I had a brother--or a sister. It's an awful bore being the only one."
"Better to be the only one than one of too many."
More minutes had gone by in the suave swinging of their steps to
Offenbach's somnolent measures when she asked, abruptly, "Do you skate?"
"Sometimes. Do you?"
"I go to the Coliseum."
Claude's next question slipped out with the daring simplicity he knew
how to employ. "Do you go on particular days?"
"I generally go on Tuesdays." If she was moved by an afterthought it was
without flurry or apparent sense of having committed an indiscretion.
"Not every Tuesday," she said, quietly, and dropped the subject there.
When, a few minutes later, she was resting on a rug thrown down on the
steps, with Claude posed gracefully by her side, Archie Masterman found
the opportunity to stroll near enough to his wife to say in an
undertone, "Do you see Claude?"
Ena's answer was no more than a flutter of the eyelids, but a flutter of
the eyelids quite sufficient to take in the summing up of significant,
unutterable things in her husband's face.