Alice Adams - Booth Tarkington (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

could help you with that buckle, Miss,” she suggested, approaching. “Has it come loose?” Alice wrenched desperately; then it was loose. The competent woman, producing needle and thread, deftly made the buckle fast; and there was nothing for Alice to do but to express her gratitude and go.

She went to the door of the cloakroom opposite, where a coloured man stood watchfully in the doorway. “I wonder if you know which of the gentlemen is my brother, Mr. Walter Adams,” she said.

“Yes’m; I know him.”

“Could you tell me where he is?”

“No’m; I couldn’t say.”

“Well, if you see him, would you please tell him that his sister, Miss Adams, is looking for him and very anxious to speak to him?”

“Yes’m. Sho’ly, sho’ly!”

As she went away he stared after her and seemed to swell with some bursting emotion. In fact, it was too much for him, and he suddenly retired within the room, releasing strangulated laughter.

Walter remonstrated. Behind an excellent screen of coats and hats, in a remote part of the room, he was kneeling on the floor, engaged in a game of chance with a second coloured attendant; and the laughter became so vehement that it not only interfered with the pastime in hand, but threatened to attract frozen-face attention.

“I cain’ he’p it, man,” the laughter explained. “I cain’ he’p it! You sut’n’y the beatin’es’ white boy ’n ’is city!”

The dancers were swinging into an encore as Alice halted for an irresolute moment in a doorway. Across the room, a cluster of matrons sat chatting absently, their eyes on their dancing daughters; and Alice, finding a refugee’s courage, dodged through the scurrying couples, seated herself in a chair on the outskirts of this colony of elders, and began to talk eagerly to the matron nearest her. The matron seemed unaccustomed to so much vivacity, and responded but dryly, whereupon Alice was more vivacious than ever; for she meant now to present the picture of a jolly girl too much interested in these wise older women to bother about every foolish young man who asked her for a dance.

Her matron was constrained to go so far as to supply a tolerant nod, now and then, in complement to the girl’s animation, and Alice was grateful for the nods. In this fashion she supplemented the exhausted resources of the dressing-room and the box-tree nook; and lived through two more dances, when again Mr. Frank Dowling presented himself as a partner.

She needed no pretense to seek the dressing-room for repairs after that number; this time they were necessary and genuine. Dowling waited for her, and when she came out he explained for the fourth or fifth time how the accident had happened. “It was entirely those other people’s fault,” he said. “They got me in a kind of a corner, because neither of those fellows knows the least thing about guiding; they just jam ahead and expect everybody to get out of their way. It was Charlotte Thom’s diamond crescent pin that got caught on your dress in the back and made such a⁠—”

“Never mind,” Alice said in a tired voice. “The maid fixed it so that she says it isn’t very noticeable.”

“Well, it isn’t,” he returned. “You could hardly tell there’d been anything the matter. Where do you want to go? Mother’s been interfering in my affairs some more and I’ve got the next taken.”

“I was sitting with Mrs. George Dresser. You might take me back there.”

He left her with the matron, and Alice returned to her picture-making, so that once more, while two numbers passed, whoever cared to look was offered the sketch of a jolly, clever girl preoccupied with her elders. Then she found her friend Mildred standing before her, presenting Mr. Arthur Russell, who asked her to dance with him.

Alice looked uncertain, as though not sure what her engagements were; but her perplexity cleared; she nodded, and swung rhythmically away with the tall applicant. She was not grateful to her hostess for this alms. What a young hostess does with a fiancé, Alice thought, is to make him dance with the unpopular girls. She supposed that Mr. Arthur Russell had already danced with Ella Dowling.

The loan of a lover, under these circumstances, may be painful to the lessee, and Alice, smiling never more brightly, found nothing to say to Mr. Russell, though she thought he might have found something to say to her. “I wonder what Mildred told him,” she thought. “Probably she said, ‘Dearest, there’s one more girl you’ve got to help me out with. You wouldn’t like her much, but she dances well enough and she’s having a rotten time. Nobody ever goes near her any more.’ ”

When the music stopped, Russell added his applause to the hand-clapping that encouraged the uproarious instruments to continue, and as they renewed the tumult, he said heartily, “That’s splendid!”

Alice gave him a glance, necessarily at short range, and found his eyes kindly and pleased. Here was a friendly soul, it appeared, who probably “liked everybody.” No doubt he had applauded for an encore when he danced with Ella Dowling, gave Ella the same genial look, and said, “That’s splendid!”

When the encore was over, Alice spoke to him for the first time.

“Mildred will be looking for you,” she said. “I think you’d better take me back to where you found me.”

He looked surprised. “Oh, if you⁠—”

“I’m sure Mildred will be needing you,” Alice said, and as she took his arm and they walked toward Mrs. Dresser, she thought it might be just possible to make a further use of the loan. “Oh, I wonder if you⁠—” she began.

“Yes?” he said, quickly.

“You don’t know my brother, Walter Adams,” she said. “But he’s somewhere I think possibly he’s in a smoking-room or some place where girls aren’t expected, and if you wouldn’t think it too much trouble to inquire⁠—”

“I’ll find him,” Russell said, promptly. “Thank you so much for that dance. I’ll bring your brother in a moment.”

It was to be a long moment, Alice decided, presently. Mrs. Dresser had grown restive; and