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No art is required, nor any selection, nor any ideality, only capacity for increasing the vacuous commonplace in life. A princess born may have this, or the leader of cotillons. Yet in the judgment the responsibility will rest upon the writers who set the copy.
However, if this is the Miss Rosamund Marshall who has begun lately to figure at teas and receptions and cotillons, and always contrives to be the bright particular Is it?" Marshall smiled slowly. All this was true enough, and he could not profess himself completely displeased. He nodded. "Well, then, you'll have to stand it; you can't avoid it; it can't be helped.
No ball is complete without him, and his presence at any dinner is sufficient to assure its success. He leads all the cotillons worth speaking of, and is a universal favorite. I swore secrecy; but I can tell you that it can be contained in one word, and that word is SIMPATICO, which is Italian for his rendezvous with HER at the American Doctor Sim's house, for it is there he meets her.
I see a picture of two children; but she is the fairer, and in her pale eyes and thinly-curved lips there is a mixture of yearning and restlessness. As the child was, so is the woman, and Georgette has lived to paper one entire wall of her bedroom with trophies won in the battlefields of ardently danced cotillons.
"I have been introduced to her twice," she continued, "but of course I wouldn't speak to her. The little man with the lisp, next to her, who is always acting in that silly way, they call Toots Cuthbert. He gets his name in the newspapers by leading cotillons in New York and Newport. And the tall, slim, blond one, with the green hat and the feather in it, is Jimmy Wing.
She clapped her hand over her mouth and fled, uttering sounds. The governess, however, set herself to comfort her heartbroken charge, and presently succeeded in restoring Miss Rennsdale to a semblance of that poise with which a lady receives callers and accepts invitations to dance cotillons. But she continued to sob at intervals.
He could not have said he was in love with her. He had been in love once when he married his first wife, who bore him a triad of splendid sons, one "keeping store" in the Western States and the other two at home on the farm, all three great giants of fellows, handsome in the fields or at barn-doors or in market-waggons, but plain on Sundays in black coats or at evening dances in the big ball-room at the Inn, when they would shuffle noisily through cotillons or labor clumsily through a Highland Schottische.
It would move a blasé smile on the downy lips of juvenile Lovelaces, who count their conquests by their cotillons, and think nothing of making a declaration in an avant-deux, to be told of young people spending several evenings of each week in the year together, and speaking no word of love until they were ready to name their wedding-day. Yet such was the sober habit of the place and time.
"I have been introduced to her twice," she continued, "but of course I wouldn't speak to her. The little man with the lisp, next to her, who is always acting in that silly way, they call Toots Cuthbert. He gets his name in the newspapers by leading cotillons in New York and Newport. And the tall, slim, blond one, with the green hat and the feather in it, is Jimmy Wing.
At one end was a slightly-raised stage, and off that was a tiny chamber, originally known as the toy-room, and pretty well dedicated to the same use now, being stored with properties for cotillons, the aforesaid games, theatrical representations, &c. There was a regular drop-curtain to the stage, but that was all. Scenery there was none.
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