The Card | Page 6

about the antics of one of the Countess's horses.

He went upstairs again, and met Ruth Earp coming down. She was
glorious in white. Except that nothing glittered in her hair, she looked
the very equal of the Countess, at a little distance, plain though her
features were.
"What about that waltz?" Denry began informally.
"That waltz is nearly over," said Ruth Earp, with chilliness. "I suppose
you've been staring at her ladyship with all the other men."
"I'm awfully sorry," he said. "I didn't know the waltz was----"
"Well, why didn't you look at your programme?"
"Haven't got one," he said naïvely.
He had omitted to take a programme. Ninny! Barbarian!
"Better get one," she said cuttingly, somewhat in her rôle of dancing
mistress.
"Can't we finish the waltz?" he suggested, crestfallen.
"No!" she said, and continued her solitary way downwards.
She was hurt. He tried to think of something to say that was equal to
the situation, and equal to the style of his suit. But he could not. In a
moment he heard her, below him, greeting some male acquaintance in
the most effusive way.
Yet, if Denry had not committed a wicked crime for her, she could
never have come to the dance at all!
He got a programme, and with terror gripping his heart he asked sundry
young and middle-aged women whom he knew by sight and by name
for a dance. (Ruth had taught him how to ask.) Not one of them had a
dance left. Several looked at him as much as to say: "You must be a
goose to suppose that my programme is not filled up in the twinkling of
my eye!"

Then he joined a group of despisers of dancing near the main door.
Harold Etches was there, the wealthiest manufacturer of his years
(barely twenty-four) in the Five Towns. Also Shillitoe, cause of another
of Denry's wicked crimes. The group was taciturn, critical, and very
doggish.
The group observed that the Countess was not dancing. The Earl was
dancing (need it be said with Mrs Jos Curtenty, second wife of the
Deputy Mayor?), but the Countess stood resolutely smiling, surrounded
by aldermen. Possibly she was getting her breath; possibly nobody had
had the pluck to ask her. Anyhow, she seemed to be stranded there, on
a beach of aldermen. Very wisely she had brought with her no members
of a house-party from Sneyd Hall. Members of a house-party, at a
municipal ball, invariably operate as a bar between greatness and
democracy; and the Countess desired to participate in the life of the
people.
"Why don't some of those johnnies ask her?" Denry burst out. He had
hitherto said nothing in the group, and he felt that he must be a man
with the rest of them.
"Well, you go and do it. It's a free country," said Shillitoe.
"So I would, for two pins!" said Denry.
Harold Etches glanced at him, apparently resentful of his presence there.
Harold Etches was determined to put the extinguisher on him.
"I'll bet you a fiver you don't," said Etches scornfully.
"I'll take you," said Denry, very quickly, and very quickly walked off.
VII
"She can't eat me. She can't eat me!"
This was what he said to himself as he crossed the floor. People seemed
to make a lane for him, divining his incredible intention. If he had not

started at once, if his legs had not started of themselves, he would never
have started; and, not being in command of a fiver, he would
afterwards have cut a preposterous figure in the group. But started he
was, like a piece of clockwork that could not be stopped! In the grand
crises of his life something not himself, something more powerful than
himself, jumped up in him and forced him to do things. Now for the
first time he seemed to understand what had occurred within him in
previous crises.
In a second--so it appeared--he had reached the Countess. Just behind
her was his employer, Mr Duncalf, whom Denry had not previously
noticed there. Denry regretted this, for he had never mentioned to Mr
Duncalf that he was coming to the ball, and he feared Mr Duncalf.
"Could I have this dance with you?" he demanded bluntly, but smiling
and showing his teeth.
No ceremonial title! No mention of "pleasure" or "honour." Not a trace
of the formula in which Ruth Earp had instructed him! He forgot all
such trivialities.
"I've won that fiver, Mr Harold Etches," he said to himself.
The mouths of aldermen inadvertently opened. Mr Duncalf blenched.
"It's nearly over, isn't it?" said the Countess, still efficiently smiling.
She did not recognise Denry. In that suit he might have been a Foreign
Office attaché.
"Oh! that doesn't matter, I'm sure," said Denry.