absent companion even more amusing than she would
let him see when he returned: there was jovial
intrigue of some sort afoot, evidently. Her eyes,
beaming with secret fun, were averted from intruders,
but sometimes, when couples approached, seeking possession
of the nook, her thoughts about the absentee appeared
to threaten her with outright laughter; and though
one or two girls looked at her skeptically, as they
turned away, their escorts felt no such doubts, and
merely wondered what importantly funny affair Alice
Adams was engaged in. She had learned to do
it perfectly.
She had learned it during the last two years; she
was twenty when for the first time she had the shock
of finding herself without an applicant for one of
her dances. When she was sixteen “all
the nice boys in town,” as her mother said, crowded
the Adamses’ small veranda and steps, or sat
near by, cross-legged on the lawn, on summer evenings;
and at eighteen she had replaced the boys with “the
older men.” By this time most of “the
other girls,” her contemporaries, were away
at school or college, and when they came home to stay,
they “came out”—that feeble
revival of an ancient custom offering the maiden to
the ceremonial inspection of the tribe. Alice
neither went away nor “came out,” and,
in contrast with those who did, she may have seemed
to lack freshness of lustre—jewels are
richest when revealed all new in a white velvet box.
And Alice may have been too eager to secure new retainers,
too kind in her efforts to keep the old ones.
She had been a belle too soon.
CHAPTER VIII
The device of the absentee partner has the defect
that it cannot be employed for longer than ten or
fifteen minutes at a time, and it may not be repeated
more than twice in one evening: a single repetition,
indeed, is weak, and may prove a betrayal. Alice
knew that her present performance could be effective
during only this interval between dances; and though
her eyes were guarded, she anxiously counted over
the partnerless young men who lounged together in
the doorways within her view. Every one of them
ought to have asked her for dances, she thought, and
although she might have been put to it to give a reason
why any of them “ought,” her heart was
hot with resentment against them.
For a girl who has been a belle, it is harder to live
through these bad times than it is for one who has
never known anything better. Like a figure of
painted and brightly varnished wood, Ella Dowling
sat against the wall through dance after dance with
glassy imperturbability; it was easier to be wooden,
Alice thought, if you had your mother with you, as
Ella had. You were left with at least the shred
of a pretense that you came to sit with your mother
as a spectator, and not to offer yourself to be danced
with by men who looked you over and rejected you—not
for the first time. “Not for the first
time”: there lay a sting! Why had
you thought this time might be different from the other
times? Why had you broken your back picking those
hundreds of violets?
