In the ensuing fortnight a great many gaieties besides the Egyptian ball
took place, and Colville went wherever he and Imogene were both invited.
He declined the quiet dinners which he liked, and which his hearty
appetite and his habit of talk fitted him to enjoy, and accepted
invitations to all sorts of evenings and At Homes, where dancing
occupied a modest corner of the card, and usurped the chief place in the
pleasures. At these places it was mainly his business to see Imogene
danced with by others, but sometimes he waltzed with her himself, and
then he was complimented by people of his own age, who had left off
dancing, upon his vigour. They said they could not stand that sort of
thing, though they supposed, if you kept yourself in practice, it did
not come so hard. One of his hostesses, who had made a party for her
daughters, told him that he was an example to everybody, and that if
middle-aged people at home mingled more in the amusements of the young,
American society would not be the silly, insipid, boy-and-girl affair
that it was now. He went to these places in the character of a young
man, but he was not readily accepted or recognised in that character.
They gave him frumps to take out to supper, mothers and maiden aunts,
and if the mothers were youngish, they threw off on him, and did not
care for his talk.
At one of the parties Imogene seemed to become aware for the first time
that the lapels of his dress-coat were not faced with silk.
"Why don't you have them so?" she asked. "All the _other_ young men
have. And you ought to wear a _boutonnière_."
"Oh, I think a man looks rather silly in silk lapels at my--" He
arrested himself, and then continued: "I'll see what the tailor can do
for me. In the meantime, give me a bud out of your bouquet."
"How sweet you are!" she sighed. "You do the least thing so that it is
ten times as good as if any one else did it."
The same evening, as he stood leaning against a doorway, behind Imogene
and a young fellow with whom she was beginning a quadrille, he heard her
taking him to task.
"Why do you say 'Sir' to Mr. Colville?"
"Well, I know the English laugh at us for doing it, and say it's like
servants; but I never feel quite right answering just 'Yes' and 'No' to
a man of his age."
This was one of the Inglehart boys, whom he met at nearly all of these
parties, and not all of whom were so respectful. Some of them treated
him upon an old-boy theory, joking him as freely as if he were one of
themselves, laughing his antiquated notions of art to scorn, but
condoning them because he was good-natured, and because a man could not
help being of his own epoch anyway. They put a caricature of him among
the rest on the walls of their _trattoria_, where he once dined with
them.
Mrs. Bowen did not often see him when he went to call upon Imogene, and
she was not at more than two or three of the parties. Mrs. Amsden came
to chaperon the girl, and apparently suffered an increase of unrequited
curiosity in regard to his relations to the Bowen household, and the
extraordinary development of his social activity. Colville not only went
to all those evening parties, but he was in continual movement during
the afternoon at receptions and at "days," of which he began to think
each lady had two or three. Here he drank tea, cup after cup, in
reckless excitement, and at night when he came home from the dancing
parties, dropping with fatigue, he could not sleep till toward morning.
He woke at the usual breakfast-hour, and then went about drowsing
throughout the day till the tea began again in the afternoon. He fell
asleep whenever he sat down, not only in the reading-room at Viesseux's,
where he disturbed the people over their newspapers by his
demonstrations of somnolence, but even at church, whither he went one
Sunday to please Imogene, and started awake during the service with the
impression that the clergyman had been making a joke. Everybody but
Imogene was smiling. At the café he slept without scruple, selecting a
corner seat for the purpose, and proportioning his _buonamano_ to the
indulgence of the _giovane_. He could not tell how long he slept at
these places, but sometimes it seemed to him hours.
One day he went to see Imogene, and while Effie Bowen stood prattling to
him as he sat waiting for Imogene to come in, he faded light-headedly
away from himself on the sofa, as if he had been in his corner at the
café. Then he was aware of some one saying "Sh!" and he saw Effie
Bowen, with her finger on her lip, turned toward Imogene, a figure of
beautiful despair in the doorway. He was all tucked up with sofa
pillows, and made very comfortable, by the child, no doubt. She slipped
out, seeing him awake, so as to leave him and Imogene alone, as she had
apparently been generally instructed to do, and Imogene came forward.
"What is the matter, Theodore?" she asked patiently. She had taken to
calling him Theodore when they were alone. She owned that she did not
like the name, but she said it was right she should call him by it,
since it was his. She came and sat down beside him, where he had raised
himself to a sitting posture, but she did not offer him any caress.
"Nothing," he answered. "But this climate is making me insupportably
drowsy; or else the spring weather."
"Oh no; it isn't that," she said, with a slight sigh. He had left her in
the middle of a german at three o'clock in the morning, but she now
looked as fresh and lambent as a star. "It's the late hours. They're
killing you."
Colville tried to deny it; his incoherencies dissolved themselves in a
yawn, which he did not succeed in passing for a careless laugh.
"It won't do," she said, as if speaking to herself; "no, it won't do."
"Oh yes, it will," Colville protested. "I don't mind being up. I've been
used to it all my life on the paper. It's just some temporary thing.
It'll come all right."
"Well, no matter," said Imogene. "It makes you ridiculous, going to all
those silly places, and I'd rather give it up."
The tears began to steal down her cheeks, and Colville sighed. It seemed
to him that somebody or other was always crying. A man never quite gets
used to the tearfulness of women.
"Oh, don't mind it," he said. "If you wish me to go, I will go! Or die
in the attempt," he added, with a smile.
Imogene did not smile with him. "I don't wish you to go any more. It was
a mistake in the first place, and from this out I will adapt myself to
you."
"And give up all your pleasures? Do you think I would let you do that?
No, indeed! Neither in this nor in anything else. I will not cut off
your young life in any way, Imogene--not shorten it or diminish it. If I
thought I should do that, or you would try to do it for me, I should
wish I had never seen you."
"It isn't that. I know how good you are, and that you would do anything
for me."
"Well, then, why don't you go to these fandangoes alone? I can see that
you have me on your mind all the time, when I'm with you."
"Oughtn't I?"
"Yes, up to a certain point, but not up to the point of spoiling your
fun. I will drop in now and then, but I won't try to come to all of
them, after this; you'll get along perfectly well with Mrs. Amsden, and
I shall be safe from her for a while. That old lady has marked me for
her prey: I can see it in her glittering eyeglass. I shall fall asleep
some evening between dances, and then she will get it all out of me."
Imogene still refused to smile. "No; I shall give it up. I don't think
it's well, going so much without Mrs. Bowen. People will begin to talk."
"Talk?"
"Yes; they will begin to say that I had better stay with her a little
more, if she isn't well."
"Why, isn't Mrs. Bowen well?" asked Colville, with trepidation.
"No; she's miserable. Haven't you noticed?"
"She sees me so seldom now. I thought it was only her headaches----"
"It's much more than that. She seems to be failing every way. The doctor
has told her she ought to get away from Florence." Colville could not
speak; Imogene went on. "She's always delicate, you know. And I feel
that all that's keeping her here now is the news from home that I--we're
waiting for."