Alice Adams Booth Tarkington (ebook reader txt) 📖

well off; at least Henrietta Lamb told Ella he was. Ella says⁠—”

Alice interrupted again, with an increased irritability. “Oh, never mind what Ella says! Let’s find something better to talk about than Mr. Russell!”

“Well, I’m willing,” Mr. Dowling assented, ruefully. “What you want to talk about?”

But this liberal offer found her unresponsive; she sat leaning back, silent, her arms along the arms of her chair, and her eyes, moist and bright, fixed upon a wide doorway where the dancers fluctuated. She was disquieted by more than Mildred’s reserve, though reserve so marked had certainly the significance of a warning that Alice’s definition, “my most intimate friend,” lacked sanction. Indirect notice to this effect could not well have been more emphatic, but the sting of it was left for a later moment. Something else preoccupied Alice: she had just been surprised by an odd experience. At first sight of this Mr. Arthur Russell, she had said to herself instantly, in words as definite as if she spoke them aloud, though they seemed more like words spoken to her by some unknown person within her: “There! That’s exactly the kind of looking man I’d like to marry!”

In the eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted with blessing upon blessing. In Alice’s eyes, Mildred had been blessed enough; something ought to be left over, by this time, for another girl. The final touch to the heaping perfection of Christmas-in-everything for Mildred was that this Mr. Arthur Russell, good-looking, kind-looking, graceful, the perfect fiancé, should be also “very well off.” Of course! These rich always married one another. And while the Mildreds danced with their Arthur Russells the best an outsider could do for herself was to sit with Frank Dowling⁠—the one last course left her that was better than dancing with him.

“Well, what do you want to talk about?” he inquired.

“Nothing,” she said. “Suppose we just sit, Frank.” But a moment later she remembered something, and, with a sudden animation, began to prattle. She pointed to the musicians down the corridor. “Oh, look at them! Look at the leader! Aren’t they funny? Someone told me they’re called ‘Jazz Louie and his half-breed bunch.’ Isn’t that just crazy? Don’t you love it? Do watch them, Frank.”

She continued to chatter, and, while thus keeping his glance away from herself, she detached the forlorn bouquet of dead violets from her dress and laid it gently beside the one she had carried. The latter already reposed in the obscurity selected for it at the base of one of the box-trees.

Then she was abruptly silent.

“You certainly are a funny girl,” Dowling remarked. “You say you don’t want to talk about anything at all, and all of a sudden you break out and talk a blue streak; and just about the time I begin to get interested in what you’re saying you shut off! What’s the matter with girls, anyhow, when they do things like that?”

“I don’t know; we’re just queer, I guess.”

“I say so! Well, what’ll we do now? Talk, or just sit?”

“Suppose we just sit some more.”

“Anything to oblige,” he assented. “I’m willing to sit as long as you like.”

But even as he made his amiability clear in this matter, the peace was threatened⁠—his mother came down the corridor like a rolling, ominous cloud. She was looking about her on all sides, in a fidget of annoyance, searching for him, and to his dismay she saw him. She immediately made a horrible face at his companion, beckoned to him imperiously with a dumpy arm, and shook her head reprovingly. The unfortunate young man tried to repulse her with an icy stare, but this effort having obtained little to encourage his feeble hope of driving her away, he shifted his chair so that his back was toward her discomfiting pantomime. He should have known better, the instant result was Mrs. Dowling in motion at an impetuous waddle.

She entered the box-tree seclusion with the lower rotundities of her face hastily modelled into the resemblance of an over-benevolent smile⁠—a contortion which neglected to spread its intended geniality upward to the exasperated eyes and anxious forehead.

“I think your mother wants to speak to you, Frank,” Alice said, upon this advent.

Mrs. Dowling nodded to her. “Good evening, Miss Adams,” she said. “I just thought as you and Frank weren’t dancing you wouldn’t mind my disturbing you⁠—”

“Not at all,” Alice murmured.

Mr. Dowling seemed of a different mind. “Well, what do you want?” he inquired, whereupon his mother struck him roguishly with her fan.

“Bad fellow!” She turned to Alice. “I’m sure you won’t mind excusing him to let him do something for his old mother, Miss Adams.”

“What do you want?” the son repeated.

“Two very nice things,” Mrs. Dowling informed him. “Everybody is so anxious for Henrietta Lamb to have a pleasant evening, because it’s the very first time she’s been anywhere since her father’s death, and of course her dear grandfather’s an old friend of ours, and⁠—”

“Well, well!” her son interrupted. “Miss Adams isn’t interested in all this, mother.”

“But Henrietta came to speak to Ella and me, and I told her you were so anxious to dance with her⁠—”

“Here!” he cried. “Look here! I’d rather do my own⁠—”

“Yes; that’s just it,” Mrs. Dowling explained. “I just thought it was such a good opportunity; and Henrietta said she had most of her dances taken, but she’d give you one if you asked her before they were all gone. So I thought you’d better see her as soon as possible.”

Dowling’s face had become rosy. “I refuse to do anything of the kind.”

“Bad fellow!” said his mother, gaily. “I thought this would be the best time for you to see Henrietta, because it won’t be long till all her dances are gone, and you’ve promised on your word to dance the next with Ella, and you mightn’t have