"There!" Jane had said to herself, as he stood before her small
looking-glass to give a final touch to her hair and to pull out her
puffed sleeves to their widest for the tenth and last time; "if I can
keep in mind that I am thirty-three years old, and not a day less, I
imagine I shall get through all right. Of course I sha'n't go on the
floor and dance--at least, not very much. Perhaps nobody will ask me,
anyway; of course I can expect nothing from Theodore Brower, who couldn't
waltz any more than he could fly. No; I'll just sit in the box, and then
nobody can say that I am giddy, or flighty, or trying to be too young."
She cast a last glance towards her looking-glass, which seemed smaller
than ever. "I do wish I could see both of them at once. I hope Theodore
will like 'em; the chances are, though, he'll never notice 'em at all."
Such had been Jane's modest and cautious programme, and she carried it
out pretty closely. She sat in the box with Mrs. Bates a good part of the
evening, and bowed a great many times to a great many gentlemen, young
and old, whom she had never seen before and never expected to see again,
and whose names, therefore, she made no effort to secure. She talked with
two or three with whom it seemed possible and profitable to talk, and
learned their names afterwards.
Mr. Bates himself spent very little time in his wife's box. He lounged on
one of the springy sofas in the narrow lobby behind, or leaned over the
burnished barriers of other boxes to talk murmurously with other magnates
about the Stock Exchange or the volume of traffic. He was a grave and
somewhat inexpressive person, with reticent eyes and snow-white bunches
of side-whiskers, and a rather cold and impassive manner. His wife
followed his peregrinations with an indulgent eye.
"Poor Granger," she said to Jane; "this thing tires him more and more
every year. So I give him plenty of leeway. See him now." She looked over
her shoulder, where, twenty feet away, her husband was talking across the
bronze bar with another elderly man in the adjoining box.
"It's a conference," she went on--"it's a deal; it's on my account--he
told me so himself. If it goes through it means another string to this
necklace."
She suddenly became quite smileless and rigid. "Why, what's the matter?"
asked Jane.
Mrs. Bates presently relaxed. "That woman who just passed," she
explained; "she was wondering if these diamonds weren't imitations, and
the real ones in the safety vaults down-town. Notice that other one over
there; yes, the one in nile-green, with the garnet velvet sleeves. She's
looking for me, and can't find me. There! she sees Granger--everybody
knows _him_. And now she's quieter; she's satisfied; she has taken old
Mrs. McIntosh for me, just because Granger happens to be in their box for
a moment. See, the man alongside of her is smiling and looking the same
way. I know what she's saying to him: 'Is _that_ Mrs. Bates--that plain
old woman in that dowdy gown? Well, I never!--after all I've heard and
read.' And she's so happy over it. Tell me, child; _am_ I plain, _am_ I
dowdy?"
"You are magnificent," said Jane, squeezing her hand. "Carolus-Duran is
only a dauber--and a half-blind one at that!" Jane, after the first
half-hour, had become quite habituated to her new and unaccustomed
environment. Her attitude was neither too self-conscious nor too relaxed;
and she never lost sight of the fact that she was thirty-three. Her dress
was a fabric in a soft shade of blue-gray run through by fine black
lines. Her ample sleeves took full advantage of the prevailing mode,
and several falls of wide lace passed between them, both before and
behind. Her hair was done up high, in a fashion devised by her fairy
godmother--a piece of discreet but fetching phantasy. Jane leaned back
graciously in her chair, after the manner of her favorite heroines,
losing in height and gaining in breadth; never before had she felt so
amplitudinous, so imperial.
"Whoever would suspect," she asked, turning over her shoulder to Susan
Bates, "that I was a natural-born rail?"
"Nobody," the other responded. "You never looked so well in your life."
Jane blushed with pleasure. At that moment two of the Fortnightly ladies
passed--clever creatures, who could drive culture and society abreast.
Jane, with the flush still on her face and a happy glitter in those wide
eyes, leaned forward and bowed in the most marked style at her command.
"I am here myself," she seemed to announce.
"Well," said one of the Fortnightly ladies, "where is the 'Decadence'
now?"
"Ah!" smiled the other, "that's past, and the 'Renaissance' is here
again!"
However, Jane was not so taken up with her literary affinities as to lose
sight of her own kith and kin. She saw Rosy swim past once or twice, and
was gratified by constant glimpses of an active and radiant Truesdale.
Once Statira Belden drove by in saffron satin and a mother-of-pearl
tiara. "And that's her daughter with her," commented Jane. "And there's
that girl from New York. And there goes her son--that smooth-faced little
snip. Huh!--compare him with our Truesdale!"
She leaned forward eagerly as her brother came once more into view.
"Yes," she said, "his flower is all right, and the soles of his shoes. I
wonder if--" and she leaned still farther forward and drew in a long
breath through her nose. "No, I can't smell it; I don't believe it's
bothered him any!"
Jane, in the earlier part of the evening, had sent Truesdale to the ball
as a lady sends a knight to battle. She had stopped him on the moment of
his departure at the foot of the stairs, close to the grotesque old
newel-post, to look him over with a severely critical eye.
"Has it got its posy in its button-hole?" she inquired, throwing open his
ulster. There was a gardenia there. "Yes, _that's_ all right." Then:
"Has it got its little soles blacked?" Truesdale laughed, and turned up
one of his long, slender, shining shoes, while he supported himself by
his other leg and the newel-post. "Yes, that's first-rate," she assented.
"What else is there, now?" she pondered.
"Oh! wait one second." She ravaged his inner pocket with a sudden hand.
"Has it got its 'foom'ry on its little hanky?" She drew out the
handkerchief and clapped it to her nose. "Not a drop--just wait one
second."
She tore up-stairs in great haste, and in a moment more she came tumbling
down with her own cologne bottle in her hand. "You'll kill yourself,
Jane," her mother called.
"Here!" She seized her brother's handkerchief again and drenched it with
a plentiful and vigorous douse. "There!" she said, with great
satisfaction, as she restored it to him.
"Goodness, Jane!" Truesdale cried, in laughing protest, "they'll all
smell this for fifty feet around."
Jane gave her brother a commendatory pat, and said no word. She felt that
he was now ready for conquest. Speech was superfluous.
"No, I can't smell it," said Jane, again; "I think he must have
exaggerated. He's going off in the other direction, anyway."
Mrs. Bates touched her elbow. "Who's that dark girl in pink? No; not to
the left--straight ahead."
"Why, I declare, it's Rosy!" exclaimed Jane. "And doesn't she look
lovely! She's the prettiest girl here, isn't she?"
"Yes."
"And how well that little curly-cue curl on her forehead keeps its shape!
But do you think she should have worn Maréchal Niels?"
"I dare say she's had red until she is tired of them. Who is the young
man with her?"
"Don't know," said Jane. "These new young men are getting to be too many
for _me_."
"Well, then, I'll tell you. It's Arthur Paston."
"Arthur Scodd-Paston?" asked Jane, contributing a conscientious hyphen to
the name and a laborious accent to the forepart of it. "Why, he doesn't
look so very hateful and supercilious."
"Oh, he's never that. He's a nice enough fellow. You mustn't take all my
exaggerations seriously. He's jolly and pleasant, as you see for
yourself."
"He'd better be--with Rosamund. She won't stand any great 'I' and little
'u' from anybody. But he does look real nice and stout and healthy and
rosy, and everything, doesn't he?"
"Especially rosy," said Mrs. Bates, wickedly.
"I'm ashamed of you," remonstrated Jane; and the two young people swept
on, while the music swirled and crashed, and the vast illumined ceiling
bent above them like a rainbow of promise.
During one of the promenades Truesdale passed by with Bertie Patterson on
his arm. The decorum of the walk could not exclude all of Truesdale's
lithe and swaying ease; he held his head high, and sent his eyes abroad
to right or left with an assurance that some might have felt to be an
impertinence and others an insolence. To Jane he seemed just descended
from some heaven-kissing hill. She sniffed once or twice as he went past.
"I _hope_ I didn't put too much on--I'm sure I didn't. I just sha'n't
worry about it any more."
Bertie Patterson kept step beside him bravely, though she knew that Jane
was looking at her from one side of the house and her aunt Lydia from the
other. She was striving faithfully to be worthy of her environment. To
take the arm of this brilliant young personage on any occasion at all
would have been a test of spirit; how much more so on an occasion so
brilliant and entrancing as this--particularly when the badge upon the
young man's breast connected him so closely with it, and made the
connection patent to all? She fused everything, and filled him with it
and it with him: the mounting tones of violins and trumpets, the
sparkling quincunxes of the girdling balcony-front, the wide band of
fresco which ran in unison with the arches of glittering bulbs above
their heads, the circling and swaying throng--all the sheen and splendor
of a vast and successful city.
"Nice little girl with your brother," said Mrs. Bates.
"A real dear," responded Jane. "She poured tea for Rosy."
"Did she, indeed?" And Mrs. Bates looked at her harder to avoid seeing
the passage of Gilbert Belden and his wife.
"There's another real dear," she said, presently, "if I can only catch
his eye." She held up her finger to a young man who had just conducted
Rosamund back to her aunt Lydia's box. Rosy had quite scorned the
antiquated usage of the balls of an earlier and less sophisticated day.
"Of _course_ I shall not go with any young man; I shall go with a
chaperon, and if the young men wish to see me they may see me there. It's
all right if Jane wants to go with Theodore Brower; they might do
anything after the way they bang around together in the street-cars. And
I sha'n't go even with a chaperon unless she is in a box, where I can be
taken afterwards"--a declaration which led to financial negotiations
between David Marshall and his sister-in-law, and which brought him to a
still higher appreciation of the general preciousness of his youngest
daughter.
"There! he's coming--my boy Billy. Isn't he about right?"
A tall, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-five was making his way
across the floor, and presently passed through the exit in the midst of
the lower boxes to gain the level of the upper ones.
"College all over, isn't he?" commented Jane; "his shoulders, and the way
he parts his hair."
"The best boy in the world," said Mrs. Bates, plumply, "He has been with
his father for the last four years, and he's come to be a real help to
him. Gets to the office at eight o'clock, rain or shine, and loves
nothing better than to sit and grub there all day long. Steady as a rock.
Splendid future. Holds his own nose to the grindstone like a real little
lamb. I hope he asked Rosamund for supper."
The young man presently reappeared, making his way behind the long tier
of upper boxes.
"Well, my boy, were you forgetting all about your mother and her elderly
friends? I'd never figured on your meeting the younger daughter first. My
son William, Miss Marshall. William, here's an awfully good girl; her
father thinks as much of her as I do of you."
The young man bowed, but blushed and halted before this singular
presentation.
"Well, I don't know," said Jane, filling up the breach in the first
fashion that presented itself. "If pa had the same gift of language that
you have, I should feel surer." She picked out her puffs, and then leaned
back negligently with her hands crossed. She was too thoroughly grounded
by this time to be discomposed by any youth seven or eight years her
junior.
The youth shifted his feet.
"I saw you with my sister a minute ago," continued Jane. She knew,
without looking round to see, that Mrs. Bates was smiling in the anxious,
would-be-helpful way of parents who have put their offspring at a
disadvantage.
"Yes--oh yes," the young man responded, with precipitation. "We had a
very nice polka, indeed."
"Well," said Jane to herself, "I can talk about polkas and lots of other
things." And she did. She held and entertained the young man for a full
ten minutes. She found, after all, that he was in no degree constrained
or backward, and she made him do himself justice.
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Bates, as he withdrew, "you made my Billy
quite brilliant. I don't know when I have heard so much real
conversation!"
"That's all right," responded Jane; "I was young myself once. I haven't
forgotten that."
"Only you mustn't fascinate him," protested the elder woman, with a
burlesque of maternal anxiety. "I want somebody else to do _that_." She
gave Jane a smile full of meaning.
"Aha!" thought Jane, and wondered if she were to see a certain little
romance resumed after the lapse of so many lumbering years.
"But she didn't seem to mind Paston any. Well, why should she?" concluded
Jane.
Presently Truesdale came along and asked his sister to waltz. "All
right," she said; "just for a minute; but not out in the middle--yet."
She wished to test herself first.
"You're awfully good to me, Dicky," she whispered, as he led her back.
"Cut it," said Truesdale; "I'm proud of you."
Jane got back to her lofty perch. "I'll do it once more--if anybody
asks me; yes, I will."
In another ten minutes she was on the floor again. "Quite happy, I'm
sure," she had said to Bingham.
"Only I'm no great dancer," this big and bearded bachelor had warned her.
"Neither am I," declared Jane. "I can just totter around and that's about
all." She arose quickly, shook out her plumage, took his arm, and in less
than a minute was waltzing again. "Lucky it _is_ a waltz," she thought;
"I don't want to be trying too many novelties."
Mrs. Bates moved to let them pass out. "Really," she said, "I don't want
to sit here all alone. Oh, Mr. Brower, I rely upon you. Let me have your
arm. I suppose"--with a resigned submission to the inevitable--"that I am
expected to walk around once, at least."
Brower had returned to the box, after diverting himself for some time
rather shyly in the foyer. He had given Jane a promenade earlier in the
evening, and had hoped to pass the rest of the time as inconspicuously as
might be. Jane had been much pleased by his efforts to do the right
thing--to be correctly dressed, for example. She knew from her own
experience how one thing led to another, and she was appreciative of the
pains he had taken on her account. It was easy for her to fancy how
dress-suits must lead to dress-shirts, and shirts to studs and collars
and ties and shoes and boutonnières--but Brower wore no boutonnière;
there he drew the line. "Never mind," said Jane; "that isn't necessary,
anyway. He has done quite enough as it is, and he's a good fellow to have
done it." She knew how he regarded all this: as a sacrifice to Mammon, if
not indeed to Moloch. "On my account, too," thought Jane--"every bit of
it. Isn't it splendid of him!"
Brower was vastly disconcerted on receiving this command from Mrs.
Bates--it was nothing less than a command, of course, and he must obey
it. He had found it something of an ordeal to lead even Jane round the
floor once; how much greater a one, then, to perform the like service for
Mrs. Granger Bates, whose escort could not but expect to draw scrutiny
and to provoke inquiry. He was a modest man with no pronounced social
ambitions; he would immensely have preferred to pass the same length of
time staring into a locomotive head-light.
Mrs. Bates presently effected a clearance, and with Brower as a convoy
steered straight for the open sea. She carried a bunch of plumes aloft,
showed a flashing brilliant on both the port and the starboard side, and
left a long trail of rustling silk and lace behind her. And as she
pursued her course, other craft, great and small, dipped their colors
right and left.
"I want you to see both ends of the scale," she presently said to Brower.
"You are trying to bring them closer together, they tell me."
"That is a part of our object," replied Brower.
"Well, you have one end in your Nineteenth Ward, and the other here. I
want you to get the good side of this."
"I should be glad to; there _is_ one, I'm sure."
"To begin with, don't encourage your associates to talk about the
'butterflies of fashion,' and that sort of thing. There are no
butterflies in this town, except young girls under twenty, and you surely
won't quarrel with _them_. Yes, we are all workers; what could Idleness
herself do with her time in such a place as this? You've got to work in
self-defence. Do you see that woman up aloft there?"
"Well?"
"She's the president and responsible manager of an orphan asylum. That
one over across on the other side is an officer of the Civil Federation.
Do you believe in that?"
"Devoutly."
"The woman just ahead of us--the purple velvet one--is a member of the
Board of Education; she helps to place teachers and to audit coal bills.
Why, even I myself have got a good many more things to look after than
you could easily shake a stick at!"
"And the one you this instant bowed to?"
"You mean the one who bowed to me." For Mrs. Rhodes had leaned completely
out of her box, and had then looked both right and left to observe
whether her neighbors had done full justice to the episode. "Oh, she's a
good little woman who is--climbing.
"The fact is," Mrs. Bates proceeded, "that there are not a dozen real
grown-up butterflies in town. We're coming to one now." They were
skirting one range of the lower boxes. "It's Mrs. Ingles; you must meet
her."
"Some other time, please," implored Brower, as Mrs. Bates nodded to a
sumptuous young creature not ten feet away.
"Very well." Mrs. Bates shrugged her shoulders "Yes," she proceeded,
presently, "Cecilia Ingles and her immediate set are about the only real
butterflies we have. However, I'm going to take her in hand pretty soon
and make a good, earnest woman of her."
"There is work for them all," said Brower.
"But don't let's be too serious just now," rejoined Mrs. Bates in
friendly caution.
"Who was that young man you had with you last night?" somebody demanded
of her next day.
"Mr. Brower."
"Who is Mr. Brower, may I ask?"
"A friend of Jane Marshall's." This (save that he had a trusty face) was
all that she knew of Theodore Brower; but she thought it enough.
"And who is Jane Marshall?"
Mrs. Bates gave her questioner one look. "Really, you surprise me," she
observed, and said no word more. Within a week Jane was known throughout
the inquirer's whole set.
Truesdale presently passed Mrs. Bates with a girl on his arm. "I wonder
if that's another one of the tea-pourers?" she asked herself.
It was. Truesdale was escorting Gladys--Gladys McKenna, as her complete
name had finally come to him. He had laughed on first hearing it.
"There's a _chaud-froid_ for you, sure enough!"
Gladys wore a flame-colored gown, and her eyes, curiously fringed with
black above and beneath, had an _outré_ and dishevelled appearance that
lingered in the memory as wax-works do. She kept a strong clutch on his
arm, and galloped alongside him with a persistent _camaraderie_ which
conveyed no hint of cessation.
"Why insist so strongly on a _quadrille d'honneur_?" he was asking her.
"Wasn't a march good enough?"
"We always look for a quadrille at one of the best functions--at home."
"But why draw lines? You don't object if people meet for pleasure on
terms free and equal?"
"Oh, of course if you have no celebrities here--no great figures--"
"Not one--not till you came. We are all plain people here. If any of us
forget our plainness there are plenty who are glad enough to remind us of
it."
"Are you plain, too?"
"The plainest of the lot."
"You don't seem so; you look awfully ornamental, with that ribbon and
all." The "all" meant the wave in his hair, the lustre of his eyes, the
upward flaunt of his mustache which hid in no degree the white, firm
evenness of his teeth, the freshness of a second gardenia--even the sheen
of his shapely shoes.
"The ribbon--you like it? Sorry I'm wearing only one. How would you have
liked a second running the opposite way? Or a third pinned on behind?"
"Oh, you!--How about all these other young men; are they anybody?"
"What other young men?"
"The ones with these criss-cross red ribbons."
"Oh! Well, some few of them have what you might call position, and some
are working for it, and some are not thinking anything about it; and
some, after having served their purpose, will be dropped soon enough, I
promise you."
"And you yourself--are you in, or out, or not thinking about it, or-"
"I?" returned Truesdale, carelessly. "I'm just a passer-by; I'm on my way
to Japan."
"Oh no; not Japan!" said the girl, quickly.
"Japan, I assure you," he smiled.