“You look like a princess,” he told Candace.
“William, don’t tell me you’re poetic.” She gave him her careless and pretty smile.
“No, just that I’m partial to princesses,” he protested. “I grew up in the neighborhood of a palace, in Peking, you know, where princesses lived and played. They’re not strange to me.”
Mrs. Cameron overheard and said a little sharply. “Are your sisters coming to commencement, William?”
Taken aback he, too, spoke more sharply than he knew. “They’re coming tomorrow.”
“You’re a silent sort of an ape,” Jeremy put in. “Why didn’t you tell me they were coming?”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested,” William retorted.
“Of course I am,” Jeremy insisted. “You know my sister and am I not to know yours?”
“Henrietta is quite ugly,” William said with apparent frankness. “And though Ruth is pretty, I have never discovered anything interesting about her.”
“Men never see anything in their sisters,” Candace declared.
Their interest in any conversation not connected with themselves waned quickly. In the fashion of the rich, William thought.
“It is going to be hot,” Mrs. Cameron said in a plaintive voice.
“You can’t possibly be as hot in that outfit as I am in mine,” Mr. Cameron told her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have to wear a cor—”
“Mother, spare us!” Candace put in.
“I don’t mind William,” Mrs. Cameron said. “He’s used to us.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Cameron,” William said. “Come and sit down. I hope you’ve made Candace keep the first dance for me. She promised it but she never keeps her promises.”
“She’s a very naughty girl,” Mrs. Cameron said with vague indulgence, sitting down.
“I did keep it,” Candace said. “And I don’t break my promises.”
The orchestra began to play and the ballroom seemed suddenly full. William made a smile serve for answer and drew Candace into his arms. He danced beautifully and he was aware of watching eyes. He imagined them thinking of him with admiration, however reluctant. He liked to compel admiration.
Then he looked down and saw Candace’s face, calm and beautiful. Her skin was fine and smooth and creamy white, her lips sweet and deeply cut. How fortunate for him if she would marry him soon! Why should they be long engaged? He needed Candace now, for herself and for everything she could bring to him. He would ask her tonight. He could see Jeremy’s eyes watching him. It was a man’s own business whom he married and when he married. In such dreams, compounded of the many mixtures in himself, he went through the evening, evading Jeremy, dancing with Candace again and again, and when she was not free he asked no one else. Then to his horror he saw her dancing twice with Seth James. Pangs seized him. Seth was one of her kind, the son of a man richer even than her father.
He went to Candace to claim his own last dance. “I can’t let Seth look at you like that,” he said sternly, as he took her in his arms.
She smiled dreamily without answer and he saw her shoulders shining white and her hair gold in the light of the lamps. He imagined that she was withdrawn from him and instantly he wanted to force her attention to himself.
“I won’t tell you how beautiful you are,” he said half carelessly. “I suppose Seth has said all that.”
“Yes,” she murmured.
He imagined that she was holding herself away from him and he drew her closer. “You are not in rhythm.”
“They’re playing the waltz too slowly,” she replied, but she yielded herself, her cheek all but touching his shoulder. Still he was not satisfied.
He stopped and they stood motionless in the whirling crowd. “Come along outside,” he said abruptly. “I’ve been full of something all evening — something I’ve wanted to say.”
He put her hand in his arm and led her away, looking strangely grim for a young man in love. Jeremy, across the room, watched them go through an open door and since for the moment he was not dancing, he went to find his parents. They were waltzing quietly together in a distant corner and they stopped as he came up.
“I just want to warn you,” he said in a low voice. “At this very moment William is going to ask Candace to marry him.”
“Oh dear!” his mother exclaimed.
His father looked grave. “I don’t know that we can do a thing about it,” he said after an instant’s thought.
Before Jeremy’s astonished eyes the two looked at each other and resumed again the slow measures of their waltz. He left them after another moment and then went to pour himself a large glass of whisky and drink it down.
Outside the house, under a wisteria bower in the garden lit by Chinese lanterns, William began his proposal to Candace. He had wondered how this should be done, and had made some half-dozen plans, none of which he now used. She looked so cool, so full of sweet common sense, that he felt it wisdom to approach her in like mood.
“Candy, I think you have known for a long time that I want to marry you, if you will have me.”
These were the words he spoke almost as soon as she had sat down. She shook out her little Chinese fan. He had given her the fan last Christmas, a thing of silk and sandalwood which his mother had chosen for him in Peking. He smelled the sandalwood now in the warm air of the night, and childish memories stirred, sandalwood and incense and the close sweet smell of old temples in the hills where the American missionary families had sometimes picnicked in the long, bright northern summers. He turned away from such useless remembrance.
Candace had not replied.
“Well?” he asked a little too sharply.
“I didn’t think you would ask me quite yet,” she said.
He was not able to tell from the pure cool tones whether she was glad or sorry. “I didn’t know, either,” he replied in the manner with which he had chosen to present himself to her. “Perhaps I ought to wait until I have some sort of income. But the last few days I’ve asked myself why I should wait. I’d rather like to remember some day when I’ve built you a palace and filled it with slaves that I proposed to you when I was penniless and that you accepted me so.”
She laughed. “A nice idea!” She waved the fan and once more the scent came blowing against his face. He moved from it half impatiently.
“Then will you, Candy?”
“Will I what?”
“Oh, Candy, don’t tease!”
“But you haven’t said you love me!”
“Of course I love you.”
It was the first time he had ever spoken the words to any creature and they sat upon his tongue like pebbles.
“How strangely you say that!” she said shrewdly.
“Because it is strange to me. I’ve never said it before to anybody.”
This touched her, he could see. She looked at him curiously, her lashes lifted and long. He had the usual amount of passion in him, he supposed, though he had never tried himself. Jeremy was clean and delicate, and though Martin went about visiting strange places, the young men whom William had cultivated were not often physically gross. Lustfulness was not one of his own natural sins. Yet slowly he felt rise in him a strong desire to touch this beautiful girl and, guided by instinct, he put out his arms and felt her come into them. Beneath and against his cheek he felt her hair.
“Dearest!”
The word rose to his lips of its own accord. He had heard his father use it once or twice to his mother. They had not often been affectionate before others, and the word had clung in his mind.
“Will you be good to me, William?”
“Yes, I will. I swear it.”