Miss Judith Devereux Randall was getting into her first evening gown.
The Green River High School football team was giving its annual
September concert and ball in Odd Fellows' Hall to-night. The occasion
was as important to the school as a coming-out party. The new junior
class, just graduated from seclusion upstairs to the big assembly room
where the seniors were, made its first public appearance in society
there. Judith was a junior now.
Her first dance, and her first evening gown; it was a memorable scene,
fit to immortalize with the first love-letter and the first proposal, in
a series of pictures of great moments in a girl's life--chosen by some
masculine illustrator, touchingly confident that he knows what the great
moments of a girl's life are. Judith seemed to be taking this moment too
calmly for one.
The dress lay ready on the bed, fluffy and light and sheer, a white
dream of a dress, with two unopened florist's boxes beside it, but there
was no picturesque disarray of excited toilet-making in her big,
brightly lighted room, and no dream-promoting candlelight. And there
were no pennants or football trophies disfiguring the daintily flowered
wall paper, and no pictures or programs in the mirror of the dainty
dressing-table; there was no other young girl's room in town where they
were prohibited, but there was no other room so charming as Judith's,
all blue-flowered chintz and bird's-eye maple and white fur rugs, and
whiter covers and curtains.
Judith was the most charming and immaculate thing in the room, as she
stood before the cheval-glass, bare armed and slim and straight in
beruffled, beribboned white, pinning the soft, pale braids tight around
her small, high-poised head. Quite the most charming thing, and Norah,
fingering the dress on the bed disapprovingly, and giving her keen,
sidelong glances, was aware of it, but did not believe in compliments,
even to the creature she loved best in the world.
Her mouth was set and her brown eyes were bright with the effort of
repressing them. Judith, seeing her face in the glass, turned suddenly
and slipped her arms round the formidable old creature's neck, and
laughed at her.
"Don't you think I'm perfectly beautiful?" she demanded. "If you really
love me, why not tell me so?"
"Your colour's good." Judith pressed a delicately flushed cheek to
Norah's, and attempted a butterfly kiss, which she evaded grimly. "Good
enough--healthy and natural."
"Oh, no. I made it. Oh, with hot water and then cold, I mean. Nana,
don't begin about rouge. Don't be silly. That red stuff in the box on
mother's dresser is only nail paste, truly."
"Who sent the flowers?"
"Look and see."
"Much you care, if you'll let me look."
"Do you want me to care?"
"Much you care about the flowers or the party."
Judith had caught up the alluring dress without a second glance, and
slipped it expertly over her head, and was jerking capably at the
fastenings.
"With the spoiled airs of you, and Willard Nash sending to Wells for
flowers, when his father clerked in a drygoods store at his age----"
"Oh, carnations are cheap--or he wouldn't get them."
"These aren't cheap, then."
The smaller box was full of white violets.
"Give them to me. No, you can't see the card. You don't deserve to.
You're too cross, and besides you wouldn't like it. Do my two top hooks.
Now, am I perfectly beautiful?"
Under her capable hands a pretty miracle had been going on, common
enough, but always new. Ruffle above ruffle, the soft, shapeless mass of
white had shaken itself into its proper lines and contours, lightly,
like a bird's plumage settling itself, and with it the change that comes
when a woman with the inborn, unteachable trick of wearing clothes puts
on a perfect gown, had come to her slight girl's figure. It looked
softer, rounder, and more lightly poised. Her throat looked whiter above
the encircling folds of white. Her shy half smile was sweeter. The white
violets, caught to her high girdle, were sweeter, too.
Norah surrendered, her voice husky and reluctant.
"You're too good for them."
"For the G. H. S. dance? For Willard?" Judith pretended great humility:
"Nana!"
"There's others you're more than too good for. Others----"
"Nana, don't."
"Come here." Norah put two heavy hands on her shoulders and regarded her
grimly. It was the kind of look that Judith used to associate with
second sight, and dread. It was quite formidable still. But Judith met
it steadily, with something mature and assured about her look that had
nothing to do with the softness and sweetness of her in her fluffy
draperies, something that had no place in the heart of a child;
something that Norah saw.
"Too good for them, and you know it," pronounced Norah. "You know it too
well. You know too many things. A heart of gold you've got, but your
head will rule your heart."
"Nonsense." Norah permitted herself to be kissed, still looking
forbidding, but holding Judith tight.
"Little white lamb, may you find what's good enough for you," she
conceded, unexpectedly, "and may you know it when you find it."
"You're an old dear, and you're good enough for me."
Downstairs there was a more critical audience to face. Judith saw it in
the library door, and stood still on the stair landing, looking down.
She held her head high, and coloured faintly. She looked very slender
and white against the dark woodwork of the hall. The Randall house had
been renovated the year before--becoming ten years older in the process,
early Colonial instead of a comfortable mixture of late Colonial and
mid-Victorian. The hall was particularly Colonial, and a becoming
background for Judith, but the dark-haired lady in the door had no more
faith in compliments than Norah, and there was a worried wrinkle in her
low forehead to-night, as if her mind were on other things.
"Will I do, mother?"
"It's a good little gown, but there's something wrong with the neck
line. You're really going then?"
"I thought I would."
"Be back by half-past ten. We're going to have some cards here. The
Colonel likes you to pass things."
"I thought father's head ached."
"He's sleeping it off."
"I--wanted him to see how I looked."
"I can't see why you go."
"I thought I would. I'll go outside now, and wait for Willard."
Judith closed the early Colonial door softly behind her, and settled
down on the steps. She arranged her coat, not the one her mother lent
her for state occasions, but a white polo coat of her own, with due
regard for her ruffles and her violets. The violets were from Colonel
Everard. Norah, with her tiresome prejudice against the Everards, and
mother, who thought and talked so much about them that she was almost
tiresome, too, were both wrong about this party. She did want to go.
The church clock was striking nine. There was nothing deep toned or
solemn about the chime; it was rather tinny, but she liked it. It
sounded wide awake, as if things were going to happen. Nine, and the
party was under way. The concert was almost over. The concert was only
for chaperones and girls who were afraid of not getting their dance
orders filled. The truly elect arrived just in time to dance. Some of
them were passing the house already. Judith saw girls with
light-coloured gowns showing under dark coats, and swathing veils that
preserved elaborate coiffures. Bits of conversation, monosyllabic and
formal, to fit the clothes, drifted across the lawn to her.
She had not been allowed to help decorate the hall, but she had driven
with Willard to Nashes' Corners for goldenrod, and when they carried it
in, big, glowing bundles of it, she had seen fascinating things:
Japanese lanterns, cheesecloth in yellow and white, the school colours,
still in the piece, and full of unguessable possibilities, and a rough
board table, the foundation of the elaborately decorated counter where
Rena and other girls would serve the fruit punch. All the time she
dressed she had been listening for the music of Dugan's orchestra, and
caught only tantalizing strains of tunes that she could not identify.
There was a sameness about the repertoire. Most of the tunes sounded
unduly sentimental and resigned. But now they were playing their star
number, a dramatic piece of program music called "A Day on the
Battlefield."
The day began with bird notes and bugle calls, but was soon enlivened by
cavalry charges and cannonades. The drum, and an occasional blank
cartridge, very telling in effect, were producing them now. Judith
listened eagerly.
She needed friends of her own age for the next two years, but she must
not identify herself with them too closely, because she would have wider
social opportunities by and by; that was what her mother said, and she
did not contest it; by and by, but this party was to-night.
Willard was coming for her now, half an hour ahead of time, as usual. He
crossed the lawn, and sat heavily down on the steps.
"Hello. Don't talk," said Judith.
Willard was silent only long enough to turn this remark over in his
mind, and decide that she could not mean it, but that was five minutes,
for all his mental processes were slow. Down in the hall the last of the
heroes was dying, and Dugan's orchestra rendered Taps sepulchrally.
Judith drew a long breath of shivering content.
"Cold?" inquired Willard.
"No."
"You're looking great to-night."
"In the dark? In an old polo coat?"
"You always look great."
Judith was aware of an ominous stir beside her, and changed her
position.
"Oh, Judy."
"When you know I won't let you hold my hand, what makes you try?"
"If I didn't try, how would I know?" said Willard neatly.
"Oh, if you don't know without trying," Judith sighed. The cannonade in
the hall was over, and the night was empty without it.
"They took in thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents selling tickets for
to-night." Willard, checked upon sentimental subjects, proceeded to
facts. He had so many at command that he could not be checked.
"Who did?"
"The team. They divide it. Only this year they've got to let the
sub-team in on it, the faculty made them, and they're sore. And there's
a sub on the reception committee."
"I don't care."
"You ought to. A sub, and a roughneck. The sub-team is a bunch of
roughnecks, but he's the worst. On the reception committee! But they'll
take it out of him."
"Who? The reception committee?"
"No, the girls. They won't dance with him. He won't get a decent name on
his card. Roughneck, keeping Ed off the team. He's an Irish boy."
"An Irish boy?" Something, vague as an unforgotten dream that comes back
at night, though you are too busy to recall it in waking hours, urged
Judith to protest. "So is the senior president Irish."
"No, the vice-president." There was a wide distinction between the two
offices. "Besides"--this was a wider distinction--"Murph lives at the
Falls."
Living at the Falls, the little settlement at the head of the river, and
lunching at noon, in the empty schoolhouse, out of tin boxes, with a
forlorn assembly of half a dozen or so, was a handicap that few could
live down.
"Murph?"
"The team calls him Murphy. I don't know why. They're crazy about him.
He lives a half mile north of the Falls. Walking five miles a day to
learn Latin! He's a fool and a roughneck, but he can play ball.
Yesterday on Brown's field----"
Willard started happily upon technicalities of football formations.
Judith stopped listening. He could talk on unaided, pausing only for an
occasional yes or no.
Brown's field! It was a tree-fringed stretch of level grass set high at
the edge of the woods, on the other side of the river, with glimpses of
the river showing through the trees far below. Here, on long autumn
afternoons, sparkling and cool, but golden at the heart, ending
gloriously in red, sudden sunsets, football practice went on every day;
shifting here and there, mysteriously, over the field, the arbitrary
evolutions that were football, the shuffling, and shouting, and panting
silence; on rugs and sweaters under the trees, an audience of girls,
shivering delightfully, or holding some hero's sweater, too proud to be
cold.
Judith had seen all this through Willard's eyes, or from a passing
carriage, but now she would go herself, go perhaps every day. Her mother
would let her. She would not understand, but she would let her, just as
she had to-night. Judith could be part of the close-knit life of the
school in the last two years there--the years that counted. The party
was a test and her mother had met it favourably. That was why she was
glad to go, as nearly as she understood. She did not know quite what she
wanted of the party, only how very much she wanted to go.