Alice Adams--Booth Tarkington [23]
"Oh, Glory!"
The little car was between the entrance posts; but Walter backed it out, avoiding a collision with an impressive machine which swerved away from them and passed on toward the porte-cochere, showing a man's face grinning at the window as it went by. "Flivver runabout got the wrong number!" he said.
"Did he SEE us?" Alice cried.
"Did who see us?"
"Harvey Malone--in that foreign coupe."
"No; he couldn't tell who we were under this top," Walter assured her as he brought the little car to a standstill beside the curbstone, out in the street. "What's it matter if he did, the big fish?"
Alice responded with a loud sigh, and sat still.
"Well, want to go on back?" Walter inquired. "You bet I'm willing!"
"No."
"Well, then, what's the matter our drivin' on up to the porte-cochere? There's room for me to park just the other side of it."
"No, NO!"
"What you expect to do? Sit HERE all night?"
"No, leave the car here."
"I don't care where we leave it," he said. "Sit still till I lock her, so none o' these millionaires around here'll run off with her." He got out with a padlock and chain; and, having put these in place, offered Alice his hand. "Come on, if you're ready."
"Wait," she said, and, divesting herself of the raincoat, handed it to Walter. "Please leave this with your things in the men's dressing-room, as if it were an extra one of your own, Walter."
He nodded; she jumped out; and they scurried through the drizzle.
As they reached the porte-cochere she began to laugh airily, and spoke to the impassive man in livery who stood there. "Joke on us!" she said, hurrying by him toward the door of the house. "Our car broke down outside the gate."
The man remained impassive, though he responded with a faint gleam as Walter, looking back at him, produced for his benefit a cynical distortion of countenance which offered little confirmation of Alice's account of things. Then the door was swiftly opened to the brother and sister; and they came into a marble-floored hall, where a dozen sleeked young men lounged, smoked cigarettes and fastened their gloves, as they waited for their ladies. Alice nodded to one or another of these, and went quickly on, her face uplifted and smiling; but Walter detained her at the door to which she hastened.
"Listen here," he said. "I suppose you want me to dance the first dance with you----"
"If you please, Walter," she said, meekly.
"How long you goin' to hang around fixin' up in that dressin'-room?"
"I'll be out before you're ready yourself," she promised him; and kept her word, she was so eager for her good time to begin. When he came for her, they went down the hall to a corridor opening upon three great rooms which had been thrown open together, with the furniture removed and the broad floors waxed. At one end of the corridor musicians sat in a green grove, and Walter, with some interest, turned toward these; but his sister, pressing his arm, impelled him in the opposite direction.
"What's the matter now?" he asked. "That's Jazz Louie and his half-breed bunch--three white and four mulatto. Let's----?"
"No, no," she whispered. "We must speak to Mildred and Mr. and Mrs. Palmer."
"'Speak' to 'em? I haven't got a thing to say to THOSE berries!"
"Walter, won't you PLEASE behave?"
He seemed to consent, for the moment, at least, and suffered her to take him down the corridor toward a floral bower where the hostess stood with her father and mother. Other couples and groups were moving in the same direction, carrying with them a hubbub of laughter and fragmentary chatterings; and Alice, smiling all the time, greeted people on every side of her eagerly--a little more eagerly than most of them responded--while Walter nodded in a noncommittal manner to one or two, said nothing, and yawned audibly, the last resource of a person who finds himself nervous in a false situation. He repeated his yawn and was beginning another when a convulsive pressure upon his arm made him understand that he must abandon this method of reassuring himself.