his sarcasm lacked the ring of detachment.
“Oh, that’s”—Mrs. Rogers bent forward, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips—“that’s the O’Rourke boy. He’s quite devoted, I believe.”
“I believe,” Scott said suddenly, “that I’ll get you to introduce me if she’s near when the music stops.”
They arose and stood looking for Yanci—Mrs. Rogers, small, stoutening, nervous, and Scott Kimberly, her husband’s cousin, dark and just below medium height. Scott was an orphan with half a million of his own, and he was in this city for no more reason than that he had missed a train. They looked for several minutes, and in vain. Yanci, in her yellow dress, no longer moved with slow loveliness among the dancers.
The clock stood at half past ten.
II
“Good evening,” her father was saying to her at that moment in syllables faintly slurred. “This seems to be getting to be a habit.”
They were standing near a side stairs, and over his shoulder through a glass door Yanci could see a party of half a dozen men sitting in familiar joviality about a round table.
“Don’t you want to come out and watch for awhile?” she suggested, smiling and affecting a casualness she did not feel.
“Not tonight, thanks.”
Her father’s dignity was a bit too emphasized to be convincing.
“Just come out and take a look,” she urged him. “Everybody’s here, and I want to ask you what you think of somebody.”
This was not so good, but it was the best that occurred to her.
“I doubt very strongly if I’d find anything to interest me out there,” said Tom Bowman emphatically. “I observe that f’some insane reason I’m always taken out and aged on the wood for half an hour as though I was irresponsible.”
“I only ask you to stay a little while.”
“Very considerate, I’m sure. But tonight I happ’n be interested in a discussion that’s taking place in here.”
“Come on, Father.”
Yanci put her arm through his ingratiatingly; but he released it by the simple expedient of raising his own arm and letting hers drop.
“I’m afraid not.”
“I’ll tell you,” she suggested lightly, concealing her annoyance at this unusually protracted argument, “you come in and look, just once, and then if it bores you you can go right back.”
He shook his head.
“No thanks.”
Then without another word he turned suddenly and reentered the bar. Yanci went back to the ballroom. She glanced easily at the stag line as she passed, and making a quick selection murmured to a man near her, “Dance with me, will you, Carty? I’ve lost my partner.”
“Glad to,” answered Carty truthfully.
“Awfully sweet of you.”
“Sweet of me? Of you, you mean.”
She looked up at him absently. She was furiously annoyed at her father. Next morning at breakfast she would radiate a consuming chill, but for tonight she could only wait, hoping that if the worst happened he would at least remain in the bar until the dance was over.
Mrs. Rogers, who lived next door to the Bowmans, appeared suddenly at her elbow with a strange young man.
“Yanci,” Mrs. Rogers was saying with a social smile. “I want to introduce Mr. Kimberly. Mr. Kimberly’s spending the week-end with us, and I particularly wanted him to meet you.”
“How perfectly slick!” drawled Yanci with lazy formality.
Mr. Kimberly suggested to Miss Bowman that they dance, to which proposal Miss Bowman dispassionately acquiesced. They mingled their arms in the gesture prevalent and stepped into time with the beat of the drum. Simultaneously it seemed to Scott that the room and the couples who danced up and down upon it converted themselves into a background behind her. The commonplace lamps, the rhythm of the music playing some paraphrase of a paraphrase, the faces of many girls, pretty, undistinguished or absurd, assumed a certain solidity as though they had grouped themselves in a retinue for Yanci’s languid eyes and dancing feet.
“I’ve been watching you,” said Scott simply. “You look rather bored this evening.”
“Do I?” Her dark-blue eyes exposed a borderland of fragile iris as they opened in a delicate burlesque of interest. “How perfectly kill-ing!” she added.
Scott laughed. She had used the exaggerated phrase without smiling, indeed without any attempt to give it verisimilitude. He had heard the adjectives of the year—“hectic,” “marvelous” and “slick”—delivered casually, but never before without the faintest meaning. In this lackadaisical young beauty it was inexpressibly charming.
The dance ended. Yanci and Scott strolled toward a lounge set against the wall, but before they could take possession there was a shriek of laughter and a brawny damsel dragging an embarrassed boy in her wake skidded by them and plumped down upon it.
“How rude!” observed Yanci.
“I suppose it’s her privilege.”
“A girl with ankles like that has no privileges.”
They seated themselves uncomfortably on two stiff chairs.
“Where do you come from?” she asked of Scott with polite disinterest.
“New York.”
This having transpired, Yanci deigned to fix her eyes on him for the best part of ten seconds.
“Who was the gentleman with the invisible tie,” Scott asked rudely, in order to make her look at him again, “who was giving you such a rush? I found it impossible to keep my eyes off him. Is his personality as diverting as his haberdashery?”
“I don’t know,” she drawled; “I’ve only been engaged to him for a week.”
“My Lord!” exclaimed Scott, perspiring suddenly under his eyes.
“I beg your pardon. I didn’t——”
“I was only joking,” she interrupted with a sighing laugh. “I thought I’d see what you’d say to that.”
Then they both laughed, and Yanci continued, “I’m not engaged to anyone. I’m too horribly unpopular.” Still the same key, her languorous voice humorously contradicting the content of her remark. “No one’ll ever marry me.”
“How pathetic!”
“Really,” she murmured; “because I have to have compliments all the time, in order to live, and no one thinks I’m attractive anymore, so no one ever gives them to me.”
Seldom
