Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking—for
if she did she might become startlingly human at once
as even the most perfectly poised of spinsters is
apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her
neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely
of various quaint and everlasting places of torment
that might very well be devised for Mrs. Winters—and
of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will
matter very little to anybody what becomes of her
and least of all to herself— and that Mrs.
Winters doesn’t know that she saw a chance mention
of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of “Dancer’s
Holiday” today in the “Bookman” and
that she cut it out because it had Oliver’s name
in it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of
her bag with his creased and recreased first letter
and the lucky piece she had from her nicest uncle and
a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a
dozen other small precious things.
CHAPTER XXX
The dance is at the Piper’s this time—the
last Piper dance of the Southampton season and the
biggest—other people may give dances after
it but everybody who knows will only think of them
as relatively pleasant or useless addenda. The
last Piper Dance has been the official period to the
Southampton summer ever since Elinor’s debut—and
this time the period is sure to be bigger and rounder
than ever since it closes the most successful season
Southampton has ever had.
Nothing very original about its being a masquerade,
from Mr. Piper a courteously grey-haired mandarin
in jade-green robes beside Mrs. Piper—
lovely Mary Embree that was—in the silks
of a Chinese empress, heavy and shining and crusted
as the wings of a jeweler’s butterfly, her reticent
eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing
as impassively as if she were viewing men being tortured
or invested with honor from the Dragon Throne, to
Oliver, a diffident Pierrot who has discovered no even
bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and
a mask, and Peter who [Illustration: THE LAST
PIPER DANCE HAS BEEN THE OFFICIAL PERIOD TO THE SOUTHAMPTON
SUMMER] is gradually turning purple under the furs
of a dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary
in the tunes and the three orchestras and the fact
that a dozen gentlemen dressed as the Devil are finding
their tails very inconvenient as regards the shimmy
and a dozen Joans of Arc are eying each other with
looks of dumb hatred whenever they pass. Nothing
singular about the light-heart throb of the music,
the smell of powder and scent and heat and flowers,
the whole loose drifting garland of the dancers, blowing
over and around the floor in the idle designs of sand,
floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth
wind heavy with music as the hours run away like light
water through the fingers. But outside the house
the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot
them like elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale
marble; the night is pallid with near and crowded
stars, the air warm as Summer water, sweet as dear
youth.
Copyrights
Young People's Pride from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
