"Do I look happy?" she repeated. "George says I am at my best to-night." And her eyes, even more than her words, asked over and over again, "How can I help being happy? How can I help being beautiful? How can I help being in love with life?" Yet, while her eyes asked the question, something deeper and darker than her eyes, something fugitive, defiant, and passionately mocking, glimmered in the faint smile on her lips.
"You look—oh, you look--" Jenny Blair checked herself because she wanted to burst into tears.
"When I grow up, I'm going to wear earrings," Bena was saying. "Mother had my ears bored when I was a baby, but you don't have to have holes in your ears any longer."
Mrs. Birdsong laughed, while the edge of irony trembled again in her voice. "By that time they may be all the fashion. Thank you, Matty, you mended that very nicely." Picking up her fan and a bouquet of orchids from the bed, she kissed her hand to the children and passed out into the hall and down the circular staircase to the crowded drawing-rooms, where the chandeliers were wreathed in roses and smilax and white crash was spread over the floors. At the foot of the stairs, Mr. Birdsong had waited, and slipping her hand and the feather fan through his arm, she melted with him into the kaleidoscopic maze of the waltz.
"Mamma says we mustn't go inside," Bena warned regretfully, "but we can look in from the porch. The porch is decorated just like the parlours, only there isn't any crash on the floor."
Slipping out through the back door, they ran to one of the long windows on the porch, and looked, beneath swinging Chinese lanterns, into the drawing-rooms. All the dancers had stopped, and stood in rows, watching Mr. and Mrs. Birdsong glide and dip, and glide and dip again to the intoxicating measure of The Blue Danube. Whirling, reversing, gliding, dipping, swinging, flowing, dissolving into the music, they waltzed from the end of the back parlour, past the open doors of the hall, where musicians were hidden in palms, to the front windows, which were festooned in roses and smilax. Clasping Bena's plump arm, Jenny Blair prayed with passionate intensity, "Oh, God, let my hair grow darker, and make me as beautiful as Mrs. Birdsong. Don't let me, God, look like poor Aunt Etta, or even like Aunt Isabella!" For poor Aunt Etta was sitting against the wall, between Grandfather, who nodded as if he couldn't keep his eyes open, and Miss Abby Carter, who pursed her lips into an affected smile, so that she seemed to be saying over and over, "I am having a lovely time, I am having a lovely time. Oh, I must tell everybody what a lovely time I am having."
"I believe I could dance like that if I tried," Bena said, for that was one of her little ways.
"You couldn't. Nobody ever waltzed as beautifully as Mrs. Birdsong. Grandfather says so."
"Your grandfather doesn't know everything." This was Bena's usual retort when she was pushed into a corner.
"He knows more than anybody else. He has been to balls with the Prince of Wales and kings and queens."
"That doesn't make him know anything. Kings and queens don't matter any longer."
"Yes, they do."
"No, they don't. But, even if they do, your grandfather couldn't have a party like this. You haven't got a country place and a garden and—and both a landau and a victoria and two pair of carriage horses."
Jenny Blair wrinkled her forehead. Hadn't she always insisted to her mother that Bena Peyton had no manners? "Well, I don't care," she retorted mysteriously. "We've got a curiosity, and you haven't. We've got the funniest bad smell that just comes and goes of itself."
"That's just a smell. Nobody wants a bad smell."
"But it's a funny smell. It's a curiosity."
"I don't care if it is. I don't want it. And a smell can't be a curiosity. You made up that, just as you did wood-nymph."
"Yes, it can."
"No, it can't."
Again the music had broken, and the dancers were assembling for a figure in the middle of the white crash. Mrs. Birdsong, with that summer radiance in her face, was standing beside old Colonel Hooper, who had been the best dancer in Queenborough for two generations. Aunt Isabella was walking slowly and haughtily across the floor, followed, Jenny Blair observed, by the pleading sheep's eyes of Thomas Lunsford. But Aunt Isabella, with her hand on the arm of a strange young man, took not the faintest notice of Thomas, not even when he strolled casually to her side and asked for a dance. Was it possible that she had got over caring? Was it possible that Joseph had cured her? And wasn't it strange that the more completely she ignored him, the more actively Thomas pursued? Well, that was one of the deep mysteries of conduct. Men always wanted most the thing you least wanted to give them.
Oh, if only somebody, no matter how old and ugly, would ask poor Aunt Etta to dance! Perhaps this one will, at least he is ugly enough. Grizzled, yellow, wobbling, knock-kneed, he seemed to be bearing down, as if driven, in Aunt Etta's direction. It can't be true. Yes, it is. He is really seeking her out. To be a man! Oh, the power, the glory, of being awaited in fear, of being hopefully awaited, in spite of the most unattractive appearance! But poor Aunt Etta will dance at last. She will be seen on the floor. She will be saved from the fate of a wallflower, if only by the intervention of Providence and an undesirable partner. Then Jenny Blair's heart fluttered and sank, like a wounded bird, far below her thin little chest to the place where a flannel band protected the depths of her being. For he had not stopped. He had passed Aunt Etta by and was boldly pursuing the prettiest and youngest girl on the floor. He was actually taking her from the arms of a blond and adorable youth. It was unfair of God to let Delia Barron have six men around her (Jenny Blair had counted them), while Aunt Etta was left sitting, with her sweet expression growing more false every minute, between Grandfather and Miss Abby Carter. Delia Barron was the prettiest girl in the room, after Mrs. Birdsong, who wasn't, of course, a girl but a married woman, even though she had never had children, and had never, so Mrs. Archbald had confided to Aunt Etta in Jenny Blair's hearing, wanted a child. "That," Mrs. Archbald had added in a lower tone, "is part of the trouble."
What did she mean by trouble? Jenny Blair asked now, gazing in speechless ecstasy from Aunt Etta to Mrs. Birdsong. How could any one who was all light and bloom and softness have trouble? Trouble was a drab word. When Jenny Blair shut her eyes and repeated it slowly, she saw a dull object, shaped like a bundle, which puffed out presently into an old woman, in a gingham apron, knitting a sock. But she could never, no matter how slowly she said the word, imagine Mrs. Birdsong. She couldn't even think of her mother, who had had trials, or of Aunt Isabella, who had had blows, or of Aunt Etta, who had had, and indeed was still having, disappointments.
A thin veil dropped between her eyes and the dancers. She saw the brilliant colours woven and interwoven into a tremulous pattern, and she thought, "I am so sleepy that I am here and not here." The bright confusion was flowing within and without, and it was like a stream that reflects but does not hold the images of the sunset. Slipping her hand up her bare arms, she pinched herself sharply. "I must not drop off. I must not shut my eyes. . . ."