The Cords of Vanity | Page 7

for well-meaning elders insisted these
dances amused us, and it was easier to go than to argue the point. At
least, that was the feeling of the boys.
Stella has since sworn the girls liked it. I suspect in this statement a
certain parsimony as to the truth. They giggled too much and were
never entirely free from that haunting anxiety concerning their skirts.
We danced together, Stella and I, to the strains of the last Sousa
two-step (it was the _Washington Post_), and we conversed,
meanwhile, with careful disregard of the amenities of life, since each
feared lest the other might suspect in some common courtesy an
attempt at--there is really no other word--spooning. And spooning was
absurd.
Well, as I once read in the pages of a rare and little known author, one
lives and learns.
I asked Stella to sit out a dance. I did this because I had heard Mr.
Lethbury--a handsome man with waxed mustachios and an absolutely
piratical amount of whiskers,--make the same request of Miss Van
Orden, my just relinquished partner, and it was evident that such
whiskers could do no wrong.
Stella was not uninfluenced, it may be, by Miss Van Orden's example,

for even in girlhood the latter was a person of extraordinary beauty,
whereas, as has been said, Stella's corners were then multitudinous; and
it is probable that those two queer little knobs at the base of Stella's
throat would be apt to render their owner uncomfortable and a bit
abject before--let us say--more ample charms. In any event, Stella
giggled and said she thought it would be just fine, and I presently
conducted her to the third piazza of the hotel.
There we found a world that was new.
3
It was a world of sweet odors and strange lights, flooded with a kindly
silence which was, somehow, composed of many lispings and
trepidations and thin echoes. The night was warm, the sky all
transparency. If the comparison was not manifestly absurd, I would
liken that remembered sky's pale color to the look of blue plush rubbed
the wrong way. And in its radiance the stars bathed, large and bright
and intimate, yet blurred somewhat, like shop-lights seen through
frosted panes; and the moon floated on it, crisp and clear as a
new-minted coin. This was the full midsummer moon, grave and
glorious, that compelled the eye; and its shield was obscurely marked,
as though a Titan had breathed on its chill surface. Its light suffused the
heavens and lay upon the earth beneath us in broad splashes; and the
foliage about us was dappled with its splendor, save in the open east,
where the undulant, low hills wore radiancy as a mantle.
For the trees, mostly maples of slight stature, clustered thickly about
the hotel, and their branches mingled in a restless pattern of blacks and
silvers and dim greens that mimicked the laughter of the sea under an
April wind. Looking down from the piazza, over the expanse of
tree-tops, all this was strangely like the sea; and it gave one, somehow,
much the same sense of remote, unbounded spaces and of a beauty that
was a little sinister. At times whippoorwills called to one another, eerie
and shrill; and the distant dance-music was a vibration in the air, which
was heavy with the scent of bruised growing things and was filled with
the cool, healing magic of the moonlight.

Taking it all in all, we had blundered upon a very beautiful place. And
there we sat for a while and talked in an aimless fashion. We did not
know quite how one ought to "sit out" a dance, you conceive....
4
Then, moved by some queer impulse, I stared over the railing for a
little at this great, wonderful, ambiguous world, and said solemnly:
"It is good."
"Yes," Stella agreed, in a curious, quiet and tiny voice, "it--it's very
large, isn't it?" She looked out for a moment over the tree-tops. "It
makes me feel like a little old nothing," she said, at last. "The stars are
so big, and--so uninterested." Stella paused for an interval, and then
spoke again, with an uncertain laugh. "I think I am rather afraid."
"Afraid?" I echoed.
"Yes," she said, vaguely; "of--of everything."
I understood. Even then I knew something of the occasional
insufficiency of words.
"It is a big world," I assented, "and lots of people are having a right
hard time in it right now. I reckon there is somebody dying this very
minute not far off."
"It's all--waiting for us!" Stella had forgotten my existence. "It's
bringing us so many things--and we don't know what any of them are.
But we've got to take them, whether we want to or not. It isn't fair.
We've got to--well, got to