at Norwich, tells me it has been quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague—you see. It attacks the rats, and through them other creatures.”
“And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?” asked Mrs. Thornbury.
“That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of the educated people—who should know better—as callous in the extreme. Of course, my sister-in-law is one of those active modern women, who always takes things up, you know—the kind of woman one admires, though one does not feel, at least I do not feel—but then she has a constitution of iron.”
Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own delicacy, here sighed.
“A very animated face,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at Evelyn M. who had stopped near them to pin tight a scarlet flower at her breast. It would not stay, and, with a spirited gesture of impatience, she thrust it into her partner’s button-hole. He was a tall melancholy youth, who received the gift as a knight might receive his lady’s token.
“Very trying to the eyes,” was Mrs. Eliot’s next remark, after watching the yellow whirl in which so few of the whirlers had either name or character for her, for a few minutes. Bursting out of the crowd, Helen approached them, and took a vacant chair.
“May I sit by you?” she said, smiling and breathing fast. “I suppose I ought to be ashamed of myself,” she went on, sitting down, “at my age.”
Her beauty, now that she was flushed and animated, was more expansive than usual, and both the ladies felt the same desire to touch her.
“I am enjoying myself,” she panted. “Movement—isn’t it amazing?”
“I have always heard that nothing comes up to dancing if one is a good dancer,” said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at her with a smile.
Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.
“I could dance for ever!” she said. “They ought to let themselves go more!” she exclaimed. “They ought to leap and swing. Look! How they mince!”
“Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?” began Mrs. Elliot. But Helen saw her partner coming and rose as the moon rises. She was half round the room before they took their eyes off her, for they could not help admiring her, although they thought it a little odd that a woman of her age should enjoy dancing.
Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined by St. John Hirst, who had been watching for an opportunity.
“Should you mind sitting out with me?” he asked. “I’m quite incapable of dancing.” He piloted Helen to a corner which was supplied with two arm-chairs, and thus enjoyed the advantage of semi-privacy. They sat down, and for a few minutes Helen was too much under the influence of dancing to speak.
“Astonishing!” she exclaimed at last. “What sort of shape can she think her body is?” This remark was called forth by a lady who came past them, waddling rather than walking, and leaning on the arm of a stout man with globular green eyes set in a fat white face. Some support was necessary, for she was very stout, and so compressed that the upper part of her body hung considerably in advance of her feet, which could only trip in tiny steps, owing to the tightness of the skirt round her ankles. The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny yellow satin, adorned here and there indiscriminately with round shields of blue and green beads made to imitate hues of a peacock’s breast. On the summit of a frothy castle of hair a purple plume stood erect, while her short neck was encircled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed with gems, and golden bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh of her fat gloved arms. She had the face of an impertinent but jolly little pig, mottled red under a dusting of powder.
St. John could not join in Helen’s laughter.
“It makes me sick,” he declared. “The whole thing makes me sick.… Consider the minds of those people—their feelings. Don’t you agree?”
“I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,” Helen replied, “and I always break it.”
She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man. She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time slightly excited.
“However,” he said, resuming his jaunty tone, “I suppose one must just make up one’s mind to it.”
“To what?”
“There never will be more than five people in the world worth talking to.”
Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen’s face died away, and she looked as quiet and as observant as usual.
“Five people?” she remarked. “I should say there were more than five.”
“You’ve been very fortunate, then,” said Hirst. “Or perhaps I’ve been very unfortunate.” He became silent.
“Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?” he asked sharply.
“Most clever people are when they’re young,” Helen replied.
“And of course I am—immensely clever,” said Hirst. “I’m infinitely cleverer than Hewet. It’s quite possible,” he continued in his curiously impersonal manner, “that I’m going to be one of the people who really matter. That’s utterly different from being clever, though one can’t expect one’s family to see it,” he added bitterly.
Helen thought herself justified in asking, “Do you find your family difficult to get on with?”
“Intolerable.… They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor. I’ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It’s got to be settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge. Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!” he waved his hand at the crowded ballroom. “Repulsive. I’m conscious of great powers of affection too. I’m not susceptible, of course, in the way Hewet is. I’m very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that there’s something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways so deplorable.… At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably become the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons why I dread Cambridge—” he ceased.
“Are you finding me a dreadful bore?” he asked. He changed curiously from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a party.
“Not in the least,” said Helen. “I like it very much.”
“You can’t think,” he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, “what a difference it makes finding someone to talk to! Directly I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me. I’m very fond of Hewet, but he hasn’t the remotest idea what I’m like. You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”
The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.
“I’m very old,” she sighed.
“The
