Now hair. She could not dress it neatly, for washing had taken all the oil out of it, but she had a plan. She had a piece of ribbon which nearly matched her dress, and she tied this in a bow on one side of her head, and let her hair hang down behind it. This showed her ears, which were neat.
She knew now why ladies of high fashion took so long to dress. It was nearly seven o’clock, the hour when Solly had promised to call for her. Ah, there he was below, talking to Father. She seized her coat—her only coat, a much worn garment in light brown, of a vaguely sporting character—and pulled it round her shoulders, hoping that it would look as though she were the casual sort who always wore a sports coat with evening dress. She took up her bag—a rather too capacious bag of dingy red velvet, with a tassel hanging from the bottom, which had belonged to her mother—and ran downstairs. Solly seemed startled to see her, but Professor and Mrs Vambrace appeared to notice nothing amiss. Professor Vambrace was prepared to act the Fond Father, and Mrs Vambrace was not a woman who paid much attention to externals.
“Take care of her, Bridgetower; take care of our little one,” said the Professor in a voice half jocular, half tearful. “It is the father’s heart which is broken at his daughter’s first ball.” This notion, he thought, was worthy of Barrie, and he was proud of it. He kissed Pearl, with his eyes shut, which may have been as well, and shortly afterward she was with Solly in his mother’s car. He said very little, and seemed to Pearl to be strangely apprehensive, but as she shared this feeling she decided that he, like herself, was worried about the evening before them.
“Good evening, my dear. You look sweetly pretty,” said Mrs Bridgetower, as she greeted Pearl in the hall. But Pearl could scarcely answer; she caught sight of herself in a full-length mirror. She looked ill and slightly crazed, with a pink bow on one side of her head, and her eyes aglare. The flush of tuberculosis was on her cheeks, and her mouth looked as though she had eaten untidily of the insane root which takes the reason prisoner.
And her gown! It looked like one of the crepe paper costumes which children wear at Hallowe’en. What should she do? What could she possibly do?
“Hello, Pearl! Gosh, anything for a laugh, eh? That’s the spirit!” The speaker was Bonnie-Susan Tompkins, the partner of Lieutenant Swackhammer; they had followed Mrs Bridgetower into the hall.
Pearl was stricken. When her hostess suggested that she leave her coat upstairs, she darted upward in unmistakable flight, without waiting for Ada, the elderly maid, to show her the way.
The Torso was a silly girl, and a hoyden, and unseemly in her desire for the attentions of the male. But like many silly, hoydenish, man-crazy girls, she had a great charity within her. One of her admirers had said that she had “a heart as big as a bull”, and if this special enlargement carries with it a certain sweetness and generosity of nature, the phrase may be allowed to stand. She ran up the stairs after Pearl. What she did cannot be related here, but in ten minutes they were both in the drawing-room, drinking sherry, and Pearl looked better than she had ever looked in her life; if there was any makeup on her face, it had been applied with The Torso’s artful hand. And the relaxation which she had sought earlier in sleep had come now, by this great purgation through self-knowledge and terror.
Mrs Bridgetower’s dinner party was an unforeseen success. She had expected nothing from it, for she disapproved strongly of Pearl Vambrace, whom she had not seen in three years, and she knew nothing of Lieutenant Swackhammer’s partner, but feared the worst. And when the Lieutenant had appeared in her drawing-room with The Torso, it seemed to her that matters had gone beyond the limits even of her generous pessimism. Bonnie-Susan wore a gown of peach satin from which her beautiful shoulders emerged in startling nakedness; the creation was held in place, presumably, by some concealed armature, for it had no straps, and although it was impossible to peep down the front of it, the impression which it gave was to the contrary. And as if this were not enough, the skirt was split to the knee in such a way that very little of her left leg was visible at a time, but there was a tantalizing promise of infinite riches. It was a beautiful gown, and had cost her father a lot of money, but it was not a gown to win the approval of the anxious mother of a susceptible son. Mrs Bridgetower’s first words to The Torso were to bid her to come close to the fire, lest she be cold.
The Torso, however, was a girl of a great resource. She knew that the mothers of young men rarely liked her on sight, though she was not sure why this was so, and she had developed a manner which disarmed and often won these natural enemies. She was so frank, so pleasant, that mothers usually decided that they had misjudged her; she impressed them by her common sense in agreeing with their opinions; she charmed them by taking sides with them against their sons in matters relating to the wearing of overshoes and warm scarves. She laughed at their jokes and, in her own phrase, she “jollied” them. She jollied Mrs Bridgetower so successfully that after half an hour that lady felt that there might be some hope for the younger generation after all.
Lieutenant Swackhammer, too, was a success. He had a fund of small talk, and although he had lived inland for the first eighteen years of his life, he had subsequently developed a bluff, sailorly, salt-water manner, which went very well with his somewhat extreme deference to age and grey hairs. He laughed a good deal at nothing in particular, and had a splendid grip of whatever was obvious and indisputable.
With such guests as these, Mrs Bridgetower blossomed. The Torso laughed at all her ironies, and whenever The Torso laughed, Lieutenant Swackhammer laughed too. Pearl Vambrace, though apt to be silent, was respectful and behaved nicely, and when she did speak, she said something sensible, and said it in a neatly rounded sentence, of which her hostess approved. In the atmosphere of success, Solly brightened up, and poured out the wine with a generosity begotten of relief.
The meal was a long and heavy one, and concluded with special glasses of ice-cream, into which a spoonful of crême de menthe had been injected, like a venom; with this, chocolate peppermint patties were served and Pearl, who was unaccustomed to rich food, began to feel a little unwell and sleepy. It was at this point that Ada announced that Master Solly was wanted on the telephone.
“The telephone is the curse of the age,” said Mrs Bridgetower; “even our after-dinner coffee is not safe from it.”
“Oh, how right you are,” said Bonnie-Susan; “you know, Mrs Bridgetower, I often think things were really better when you were a girl. No ‘phone, and no boys calling up all the time, and all those lovely horses and carriages and everything.”