Part 12 (2/2)

”Oh, Martie, when we've always said we'd give ANYTHING to entertain as other people do!” Sally exclaimed. ”I DO think that's unreasonable!”

Martie made no answer. She was looking at a memorandum which read: ”Invitations--cream--Angela--stamps--illusion--slippers.”

As the days went by the thought of the dance grew more and more troublesome. The details of the affair were too strange to be entered into with any confidence, any rush of enthusiasm and spontaneity. Every hour brought her fresh cause for worry.

Nothing went well. The thought of her dress worried her. She had conceived the idea of a black gown ornamented with cretonne roses, carefully applied. She and Sally cut out the flowers, and applied them with b.u.t.tonhole st.i.tch, sewing until their fingers were sore, their faces flushed, and their hair in frowsy disorder. It was slow work.

Miss Pepper, the seamstress, engaged for one day only to do the important work on both Sally's and Martie's gown, kept postponing, as she always did postpone, the day, finally appointing the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day. Pa's cousin, a certain Mrs. Potts, wrote from Portland that she was coming down for the holiday, and Sally and Martie could have wept at the thought of the complication of having her exacting presence in the house. Worse than this Pa, who was to have gone to San Francisco on business on Friday morning--whose decision to do so had indeed been one of Martie's reasons for selecting this date for the affair--suddenly changed his plan. He need not go until December, he said.

Leonard, who at first had been faintly interested in the proceedings, later annoyed his sisters by intimating that he would not be present at the dance. Martie and Sally did not want him for any social qualities he possessed, but he was a male; he would at least help to offset the alarming plurality of females.

Acceptances came promptly from the young women of Monroe, even from Ida and May Parker. Florence Frost regretted; she was smitten even now with the incurable illness that would end her empty life a few years later.

Such men as Martie and Sally had been able to list as eligible--the new young doctor from the Rogers building, little Billy Frost, the Patterson boys, home from college for Thanksgiving, Reddy Johnson, and Carl Polhemus--answered not at all, as is the custom with young men.

Sally and Martie did not like the Patterson boys; George was fat and stupid; Arthur at eighteen sophisticated and blase, with dissipated eyes; both were supercilious, and the girls did not really believe that they would come. Still, there was not much to lose in asking them.

There had been a debate over Reddy Johnson's name; but Reddy was a wonderful dancer. So he was asked, and Martie went so far as to say that had Joe Hawkes possessed an evening suit, he and Grace might have been asked, too. As it was, Sally and Martie hoped they would not meet Grace until the affair was over.

They fumed and fussed over the list until they knew it by heart. They wondered who would come first, how soon they should begin dancing, how soon serve supper. Mrs. Monroe thought supper should be served at half-past ten. Martie groaned. Oh, they couldn't serve supper until almost midnight, she protested.

Dinner was at noon on Thanksgiving Day, and the Monroes, sated and overwarm, were sitting about the fire when Rodney Parker and his friend, Alvah Brigham, came to take Martie and Sally walking. The girls were sewing at the endless roses; but they jumped up in a flutter, and ran for hats and sweaters. They did not exchange a word, nor lose a second, while they were upstairs, running down again immediately to end the uncomfortable silence that held the group about the fire.

It was a cold, bleak day, and the pure air was delicious to Martie's hot cheeks after the close house. She had immediately taken possession of Alvah; Sally and Rodney followed. They took the old bridge road, which the girls loved for the memory of bygone days, when they had played at dolls' housekeeping along the banks of the little Sonora, climbed the low oaks, and waded in the bright shallow water. Even through to-day's excitement Martie had time for a memory of those long-ago summer afternoons, and she said to herself with a vague touch of pain that it would of course be impossible to have with any man the serene communion of those days with Sally.

Mr. Brigham was a pale, rather fat young man with hair already thinning. He did not have much to say, but he was always ready to laugh, and Martie saw that he had cause for laughter. She rattled on recklessly, anxious only to avoid silence; hardly conscious of what she said. The effect of the cool, fresh air was lost upon Martie to-day; she was fired to fever-pitch by Rodney's nearness.

He had not ever said anything exactly loverlike, she said to herself, with a sort of breathless discontent, when she was setting the table for a cold supper that night. But he had brought his friend to them after all! She must not be exacting. She had so much--

”I beg your pardon, Cousin Allie?” she stammered. Her obnoxious relative, a stout, moustached woman of fifty, warming her skirts at the fire, was smiling at her unkindly.

”You always was a great one to moon, Martha!” said Mrs. Potts, ”I's asking you what you see in that young feller to make such a to-do about?”

”Then you don't like him?” Martie countered, laughing. Mrs. Potts bridled. Her favourite att.i.tude toward life was a bland but suspicious superiority; she liked to be taken seriously.

”I didn't say I didn't like him,” she answered, accurately, a little nettled. ”No, my dear, I didn't say that. No. I wouldn't say that of any young man!” she added thoughtfully.

Smiling a dark smile, she looked into the fire. Martie, rather uncomfortable, went on with her task.

”He's seemed to admire our Mart in a brotherly sort of way since the very beginning,” Lydia explained, anxious as usual to say the kind thing, and succeeding as usual in saying the one thing that could hurt and annoy. ”He's quite a boy for the girls, but we think our Martie is too sensible to take him seriously, yet awhile!” And Lydia gave her sister a smile full of sweet significance.

”HOPE she is!” Mrs. Potts said heavily. ”For if that young feller means business I miss MY guess!”

”Oh, for pity's sake--can't a man ask a girl to go walking without all this fuss!” Martie burst out angrily. ”I NEVER heard so much--crazy--silly--talk--about--nothing!”

The last words were only an ashamed mumble as she disappeared kitchenward.

”H'm!” said Mrs. Potts, eying Lydia over her gla.s.ses. ”Kinder touchy about him just the same. Well! what's he to that young feller used to come see you, Lydia? Ain't the Frosts and the Parkers kin?”

”I really think she's the most detestable old woman that ever was!”

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