She drew in a great audible breath and began to read.  What a relief it was to feel herself all one person, not two or three, probing hatefully into each other!

* * * * *

But there was something she had not done, some teasing, unimportant thing, she ought to finish before going on with the letter.  She looked up vacantly, half-absently, wondering what it was.  Her eyes fell on Toucle.  Toucle was looking at her, Toucle who so seldom looked at anything.  She felt a momentary confusion as though surprised by another person in a room she had thought empty.  And after that, uneasiness.  She did not want Toucle to go on looking at her.

“Mark hasn’t had his breakfast yet,” she said to the old Indian woman.  “Won’t you take him downstairs, please, and give him a dish of porridge for me?”

CHAPTER IX

“The Gent Around the Lady

and

The Lady Round the Gent”

An Evening in the Life of Mr. Vincent Marsh

May 25.

“Come in, come in!” cried an old black-clad woman, with a white apron, who opened the door wider into the flaring brilliance of the lamp-lit kitchen.  “I’m real glad you felt to come to one of our dances.  They’re old-fashioned, but we like ’em.”  She closed the door behind them and added cordially, “Now Mr. Welles is going to live here, he’ll have to learn to shake his feet along with the rest of us.”

Mr. Welles was frankly terrified at the idea.  “Why, I never dreamed of dancing in all my life!” he cried.  “I only came to look on.”  He hesitated to divest himself of his overcoat, panic-struck and meditating flight.  Vincent fell upon him from one side and the lively old woman from the other.  Together they stripped the older man of his wraps.  “Never too late to learn,” old Mrs. Powers assured him briskly.  “You dance with me and I’ll shove ye around, all right.  There ain’t a quadrille ever danced that I couldn’t do backwards with my eyes shut, as soon as the music strikes up.”  She motioned them towards the door, “Step right this way.  The folks that have come are all in the settin’-room.”

As they followed her, Vincent said, “Mrs. Powers, aren’t you going to dance with me, too?”

“Oh, of course I be,” she answered smartly, “if you ask me.”

“Then I ask you now,” he urged, “for the first dance.  Only I don’t know any more than Mr. Welles how to dance a quadrille.  But I’m not afraid.”

“I guess there ain’t much ye be afraid of,” she said admiringly.  They came now into the dining-room and caught beyond that a glimpse of the living-room.  Both wore such an unusual aspect of elegance and grace that Vincent stared, stopping to look about him.  “Looks queer, don’t it,” said Mrs. Powers, “with the furniture all gone.  We always move out everything we can, up garret, so’s to leave room for dancing.”