too, in dancing too often with same partner. Let me see, what was that Forbes girl’s name—the one with wall eyes—Mabel, wasn’t it?”
“No; Adéle. Mabel was the one with the bony elbows. That wasn’t wall in Adéle’s eyes. It was soul. We used to talk sonnets together, and Verlaine. Just then I was trying to run a pipe from the Pierian spring.”
“You were on the floor with her,” said Octavia, undeflected, “five times at the Hammersmiths’.”
“Hammersmiths’ what?” questioned Teddy, vacuously.
“Ball—ball,” said Octavia, viciously. “What were we talking of?”
“Eyes, I thought,” said Teddy, after some reflection; “and elbows.”
“Those Hammersmiths,” went on Octavia, in her sweetest society prattle, after subduing an intense desire to yank a handful of sunburnt, sandy hair from the head lying back contentedly against the canvas of the steamer chair, “had too much money. Mines, wasnt it? It was something that paid something to the ton. You couldn’t get a glass of plain water in their house. Everything at that ball was dreadfully overdone.”
“It was,” said Teddy.
“Such a crowd there was!” Octavia continued, conscious that she was talking the rapid drivel of a schoolgirl describing her first dance. The balconies were as warm as the rooms. I—lost—something at that ball.” The last sentence was uttered in a tone calculated to remove the barbs from miles of wire.
