The dress came home at nine o’clock, and operated a happy diversion from
my imaginable shortcomings; for it appeared from Mrs. March’s asides to
me that it was a perfect horror in the set, and that everybody could see
that it had been simply _slung_ together at the last moment, and she
would never, as long as the world stood, go to that woman for anything
again.
I must say I could not myself see anything wrong about the dress. I
thought it exquisite in tint and texture; a delicate, pale-greenish film
that clung and floated, and set off the girl’s beauty as the leafage of a
flower heightens the loveliness of a flower. I did not dare to say this
in the face of Mrs. March’s private despair, and I was silent while the
girl submitted to be twirled about for my inspection like a statue on a
revolving pedestal. Kendricks, however, had no such restrictions upon
him, and I could see him start with delight in the splendid vision before
he spoke.
“_Isn’t_ it a poem?” demanded Mrs. March. “Isn’t it a perfect _lyric_?”
“Why should you have allowed her to be transported altogether into the
ideal? Wasn’t she far enough from us before?” he asked; and I found
myself wishing that he would be either less or more articulate. He ought
to have been mute with passion, or else he ought to have been frankly
voluble about the girl’s gown, and gone on about it longer. But he
simply left the matter there, and though I kept him carefully under my
eye, I could not see that he was concealing any further emotion. She, on
her part, neither blushed nor frowned at his compliment; she did nothing
by look or gesture to provoke more praise; she took it very much as the
beautiful evening might, so undeniably fine, so perfect in its way.
She and the evening were equally fitted for the event to which they
seemed equally dedicated. The dancing was to be out of doors on a vast
planking, or platform, set up in the heart of that bosky court which the
hotel incloses. Around this platform drooped the slim, tall Saratogan
trees, and over it hung the Saratogan sky, of a nocturnal blue very rare
in our latitude, with the stars faint in its depths, and by and by a
white moon that permitted itself a modest competition with the electric
lights effulgent everywhere. There was a great crowd of people in the
portico, the vestibule, and the inner piazzas, and on the lawn around the
platform, where “the trodden weed” sent up the sweet scent of bruised
grass in the cool night air. My foolish old heart bounded with a pulse
of youth at the thought of all the gay and tender possibilities of such a
scene.
But the young people under my care seemed in no haste to mingle in it.
We oldsters are always fancying youth impatient, but there is no time of
life which has so much patience. It behaves as if it had eternity before
it—an eternity of youth—instead of a few days and years, and then the
frosty poll. We who are young no longer think we would do so and so if
we were young, as women think they would do so and so if they were men;
but if we were really young again, we should not do at all what we think.
We should not hurry to experience our emotions; we should not press
forward to discharge our duties or repair our mistakes; we should not
seize the occasion to make a friend or reconcile an enemy; we should let
weeks and months go by in the realisation of a passion, and trust all
sorts of contingencies and accidents to help us out with its confession.
The thoughts of youth are very long, and its conclusions are deliberate
and delayed, and often withheld altogether. It is age which is
tremulously eager in these matters, and cannot wait with the fine
patience of nature in her growing moods.
As soon, even, as I was in the hotel I was impatient to press through to
the place where the dancing was, and where I already heard the band
playing. I knew very well that when we got there I should have to sit
down somewhere on the edge of the platform with the other frumps and
fogies, and begin taking cold in my dress-coat, and want to doze off
without being able to, while my young people were waltzing together, or
else promenading up and down ignoring me, or recognising me by the offer
of a fan, and the question whether I was not simply melting; I have seen
how the poor chaperon fares at such times. But they, secure of their
fun, were by no means desirous to have it over, or even to have it begin.
They dawdled through the thronged hotel office, where other irresponsible
pairs were coming and going under the admiring eyes of the hotel
loungers, and they wandered up and down the waste parlours, and sat on
_tête-à-têtes_ just to try them, apparently; and Miss Gage verified in
the mirrors the beauty which was reflected in all eyes. They amused
themselves with the extent of the richly-carpeted and upholstered
desolation around them, where only a few lonely and aging women lurked
about on sofas and ottomans; and they fell to playing with their
compassion for the plebeian spectators at the long verandah windows
trying to penetrate with their forbidden eyes to the hop going on in the
court far beyond the intermediary desert of the parlours.
When they signified at last that they were ready for me to lead them on
to the dance, I would so much rather have gone to bed that there are no
words for the comparison. Then, when we got to the place, which I should
never have been able to reach in the world if it had not been for the
young energy and inspiration of Kendricks, and they had put me in a
certain seat with Miss Gage’s wraps beside me where they could find me,
they went off and danced for hours and hours. For hours and hours? For
ages and ages! while I withered away amid mouldering mothers, and saw my
charges through the dreadful half-dreams of such a state whirling in the
waltz, hopping in the polka, sliding in the galop, and then endlessly
walking up and down between the dances, and eating and drinking the chill
refreshments that it made my teeth chatter to think of. I suppose they
decently came to me from time to time, though they seemed to be always
dancing, for I could afterward remember Miss Gage taking a wrap from me
now and then, and quickly coming back to shed it upon my lap again. I
got so chilled that if they had not been unmistakably women’s wraps I
should have bundled them all about my shoulders, which I could almost
hear creak with rheumatism. I must have fallen into a sort of drowse at
last; for I was having a dispute with some sort of authority, which
turned out to be Mrs. March, and upbraiding her with the fact that there
were no women’s wraps which would also do for a man, when the young
people stood arm in arm before me, and Miss Gage said that she was tired
to death now, and they were going.
But it appeared that they were only going as far as the parlours for the
present; for when they re-entered the hotel, they turned into them, and
sat down there quite as if that had been the understanding. When I
arrived with the wraps, I was reminded of something, and I said, “Have
you two been dancing together the whole evening?”
They looked at each other as if for the first time they now realised the
fact, and Kendricks said, “Why, of course we have! We didn’t know
anybody.”
“Very well, then,” I said; “you have got me into a scrape.”
“Oh, poor Mr. March!” cried the girl. “How have we done it?”
“Why, Mrs. March said that Mr. Kendricks would be sure to know numbers of
people, and I must get you other partners, for it wouldn’t do for you to
dance the whole evening together.”
She threw herself back in the chair she had taken, and laughed as if this
were the best joke in the world.
He said hardily, “You see it _has_ done.”
“And if it wouldn’t do,” she gasped, “why didn’t you bring me the other
partners?”
“Because I didn’t know any,” I said; and this seemed to amuse them both
so much that I was afraid they would never get their breath.
She looked by and by at her dancing-card, and as soon as she could wipe
the tears from her eyes she said, “No; there is no other name there”; and
this seemed even a better joke than the other from the way they joined in
laughing at it.
“Well, now,” I said, when they were quiet again, “this won’t do, my young
friends. It’s all very well for you, and you seem to like it; but I am
responsible for your having passed a proper evening under my chaperonage,
and something has got to be done to prove it.” They saw the
reasonableness of this, and they immediately became sober. “Kendricks,”
I asked, “can’t you think of something?”
No, he said, he couldn’t; and then he began to laugh again.
I applied to her in the same terms; but she only answered, “Oh, don’t ask
_me_,” and she went off laughing too.
“Very well, then,” I said; “I shall have to do something desperate, and I
shall expect you both to bear me out in it, and I don’t want any
miserable subterfuges when it comes to the point with Mrs. March. Will
you let me have your dancing-card Miss Gage?” She detached it, and
handed it to me. “It’s very fortunate that Mr. Kendricks wrote his name
for the first dance only, and didn’t go on and fill it up.”
“Why, we didn’t think it was worth while!” she innocently explained.
“And that’s what makes it so perfectly providential, as Mrs. March says.
Now then,” I went on, as I wrote in the name of a rising young
politician, who happened just then to have been announced as arriving in
Saratoga to join some other leaders in arranging the slate of his party
for the convention to meet a month later, “we will begin with a good
American.”
I handed the card to Kendricks. “Do you happen to remember the name of
the young French nobleman who danced the third dance with Miss Gage?”
“No,” he said; “but I think I could invent it.” And he dashed down an
extremely probable marquis, while Miss Gage clapped her hands for joy.
“Oh, how glorious! how splendid!”