Chapter XII

When Susan’s engagement had been approved at home, and made public to any one who took an interest in it at the hotel—­and by this time the society at the hotel was divided so as to point to invisible chalk-marks such as Mr. Hirst had described, the news was felt to justify some celebration—­an expedition?  That had been done already.  A dance then.  The advantage of a dance was that it abolished one of those long evenings which were apt to become tedious and lead to absurdly early hours in spite of bridge.

Two or three people standing under the erect body of the stuffed leopard in the hall very soon had the matter decided.  Evelyn slid a pace or two this way and that, and pronounced that the floor was excellent.  Signor Rodriguez informed them of an old Spaniard who fiddled at weddings—­fiddled so as to make a tortoise waltz; and his daughter, although endowed with eyes as black as coal-scuttles, had the same power over the piano.  If there were any so sick or so surly as to prefer sedentary occupations on the night in question to spinning and watching others spin, the drawing-room and billiard-room were theirs.  Hewet made it his business to conciliate the outsiders as much as possible.  To Hirst’s theory of the invisible chalk-marks he would pay no attention whatever.  He was treated to a snub or two, but, in reward, found obscure lonely gentlemen delighted to have this opportunity of talking to their kind, and the lady of doubtful character showed every symptom of confiding her case to him in the near future.  Indeed it was made quite obvious to him that the two or three hours between dinner and bed contained an amount of unhappiness, which was really pitiable, so many people had not succeeded in making friends.

It was settled that the dance was to be on Friday, one week after the engagement, and at dinner Hewet declared himself satisfied.

“They’re all coming!” he told Hirst.  “Pepper!” he called, seeing William Pepper slip past in the wake of the soup with a pamphlet beneath his arm, “We’re counting on you to open the ball.”

“You will certainly put sleep out of the question,” Pepper returned.

“You are to take the floor with Miss Allan,” Hewet continued, consulting a sheet of pencilled notes.

Pepper stopped and began a discourse upon round dances, country dances, morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which are entirely superior to the bastard waltz and spurious polka which have ousted them most unjustly in contemporary popularity—­when the waiters gently pushed him on to his table in the corner.

The dining-room at this moment had a certain fantastic resemblance to a farmyard scattered with grain on which bright pigeons kept descending.  Almost all the ladies wore dresses which they had not yet displayed, and their hair rose in waves and scrolls so as to appear like carved wood in Gothic churches rather than hair.  The dinner was shorter and less formal than usual, even the waiters seeming to be affected with the general excitement.  Ten minutes before the clock struck nine the committee made a tour through the ballroom.  The hall, when emptied of its furniture, brilliantly lit, adorned with flowers whose scent tinged the air, presented a wonderful appearance of ethereal gaiety.