April Hopes | Page 4

the advantage
which his stature, gave him over most people there. Hundreds of these
were pretty girls, in a great variety of charming costumes, such as the
eclecticism of modern fashion permits, and all sorts of ingenious

compromises between walking dress and ball dress. It struck him that
the young men on whose arms they hung, in promenading around the
long oval within the crowd of stationary spectators, were very much
younger than students used to be, whether they wore the dress-coats of
the Seniors or the cut-away of the Juniors and Sophomores; and the
young girls themselves did not look so old as he remembered them in
his day. There vas a band playing somewhere, and the galleries were
well filled with spectators seated at their ease, and intent on the
party-coloured turmoil of the floor, where from time to time the
younger promenaders broke away from the ranks into a waltz, and after
some turns drifted back, smiling and controlling their quick breath, and
resumed their promenade. The place was intensely light, in the candour
of a summer day which had no reserves; and the brilliancy was not
broken by the simple decorations. Ropes of wild laurel twisted up the
pine posts of the aisles, and swung in festoons overhead; masses of
tropical plants in pots were set along between the posts on one side of
the room; and on the other were the lunch tables, where a great many
people were standing about, eating chicken and salmon salads, or
strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking claret-cup. From the whole
rose that blended odour of viands, of flowers, of stuff's, of toilet
perfumes, which is the characteristic expression of, all social festivities,
and which exhilarates or depresses--according as one is new or old to it.
Elbridge Mavering kept looking at the faces of the young men as if he
expected to see a certain one; then he turned his eyes patiently upon.
the faces around him. He had been introduced to a good many persons,
but he had come to that time of life when an introduction; unless
charged with some special interest, only adds the pain of doubt to the
wearisome encounter of unfamiliar people; and he had unconsciously
put on the severity of a man who finds himself without acquaintance
where others are meeting friends, when a small man, with a neatly
trimmed reddish-grey beard and prominent eyes, stepped in front of
him, and saluted him with the "Hello, Mavering!" of a contemporary.
His face, after a moment of question, relaxed into joyful recognition.
"Why, John Munt! is that you?" he said, and he took into his large
moist palm the dry little hand of his friend, while they both broke out
into the incoherencies of people meeting after a long time. Mr.
Mavering spoke in it voice soft yet firm, and with a certain thickness of

tongue; which gave a boyish charm to his slow, utterance, and Mr.
Munt used the sort of bronchial snuffle sometimes cultivated among us
as a chest tone. But they were cut short in their intersecting questions
and exclamations by the presence of the lady who detached herself
from Mr. Munt's arm as if to leave him the freer for his hand-shaking.
"Oh!" he said, suddenly recurring to her; "let me introduce you to Mrs.
Pasmer, Mr. Mavering," and the latter made a bow that creased his
waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer's pretty little nose.
His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age;
and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve.
His coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a
certain habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large
handsome face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated
the consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate
place.
Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of
pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe.
Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of
some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three
things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of
these old friends. They declared that they had not seen each other for
twenty years, or, at any rate, not since '59. She listened while they
disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr.
Munt, as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself,
when she saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to
society, which had since so fully accepted him, and she had so
suddenly, the moment before, found her self hand in glove with him
that she might well have appealed