The Innocent Adventuress Part 11

Very different would be Lucia's wedding party in the Palazzo Santonini, on that marvelous old service that Pietro polished but three times a year, with every morsel of refreshment arranged and calculated beforehand.

What miracles of economy would be performed in that stone-flagged kitchen, many of them by Mamma's own hands! Suddenly Maria Angelina found a moment to wonder afresh at that mother . . . and with a new vision. . . . For Mamma had come from this profusion.

"They have a regular place at Newport." Ruth was concluding some unheard speech behind her. "But they like this better. . . . This is the life,"

and with a just faintly discernible note of proprietorship in her air she was off down the stairs.

"Didn't they find Newport rather chilly?" murmured the girl to whom she had been talking. "Wasn't Mrs. M. a Smith or a Brown-Jones or something----?"

"It was something in b.u.t.terine," said another guest negligently and swore, softly and intensely, at a shoulder strap. "Oh, _d.a.m.n_ the thing! . . . Well--flop if you want to. I've got nothing to hide."

"You know why girls hide their ears, don't you?" said the other voice, and the second girl flung wearily back, "Oh, so they can have something to show their husbands--I heard that in my cradle!"

"It _is_ rather old," its sponsor acknowledged wittily, and the pair went clattering on.

Had America, Maria Angelina wondered, been like this in her mother's youth? Was it from such speeches that her mother had turned, in helplessness or distaste, to the delicate implications, the finished innuendo of the Italian world?

Or had times changed? Were these girls truly different from their mothers? Was it a new society?

That was it, she concluded, and she, in her old-world seclusion, was of another era from these a.s.sured ones. . . . Again, for a moment the doubt of her capacity to cope with these times a.s.sailed her, but only for a moment, for next instant she caught Johnny Byrd's upturned glance from the floor below and in its flash of admiration, as unstinted as a sun bath, her confidence drew reanimation.

Later, she found that same warmth in other men's eyes and in the eagerness with which they kept cutting in.

That cutting in, itself, was strange to her. It filled her with a terrifying perspective of what would happen if she were _not_ cut in upon--if she were left to gyrate endlessly in the arms of some luckless one, eternally stuck. . . .

At home, at a ball, she knew that there were fixed dances, and programs, in which engagements were jotted definitely down, and at each dance's end a girl was returned respectfully to her chaperon where the next partner called for her. Often she had scanned Lucia's scrawled programs for the names there.

But none of that now.

Up and down the hall she sped in some man's arms, round and round, up and down, until another man, agile, dexterous, shot between the couples and claimed her. And then up and down again until some other man. . . .

And sometimes they went back to rest in the intimately arranged chairs beneath the balcony, and sometimes stepped out of doors to saunter along a wide terrace.

It was incredibly independent. It was intoxicatingly free. It was also terrifyingly responsible.

And Maria Angelina, in her young fear of unpopularity, smiled so ingenuously upon each arrival, with a shy, backward deprecatory glance at her lost partner, that she stirred something new and wondering in each seasoned breast, and each dancer came again and again.

But all of them, the new young men from town, the tennis champion from Yale, the polo player from England, the lawyer from Washington, the stout widower, the professional bachelor, all were only moving shapes that came and went and came again and by their tribute made her successful in Johnny's eyes.

Indeed, so well did they do their work that Johnny was moved to brusque expostulation.

"Look here, Ri-Ri, I told you this was to be _my_ dance! With all those outsiders cutting in--Freeze them, Ri-Ri. Try a long, hard level look on the next one you see making your way. . . . Don't you _want_ to dance with me, any more? Huh? Where's that stand-in of mine? Is it a little, old last year's model?"

"But what am I to do----?"

"Fight 'em off. Bite 'em. Kick their shins. . . . Oh, Lord," groaned Johnny, dexterously whirling her about, "there's another coming. . . .

Here's where we go. This way out."

Speedily he piloted her through the throng. Masterfully he caught her arm and drew her out of doors.

She was glad to be out of the dance. His clasp had been growing too personal . . . too tight. . . . Perhaps she was only oddly self-conscious . . . incapable of the serene detachment of those other dancers, who, yielding and intertwined, revolved in intimate harmony.

There was a moon. It shone soft and bright upon them, making a world of enchantment. The long lines of the mountains melted together like a violet cloud and above them a round top floated, pale and dreamy, as the dome of Saint Peter's at twilight.

From the terrace stretched a gra.s.sy path where other couples were strolling and Johnny Byrd guided her past them. They walked in silence.

He kept his hand on her arm and from time to time glanced about at her in a half-constraint that was no part of his usual air.

At a curve of the path the girl drew definitely back.

"Ah no----"

"Oh, why not? Isn't it the custom?" He laughed over the often-cited phrase but absently. His eyes had a warm, hurrying look in them that rooted her feet the more stubbornly to the ground.

"Decidedly not." She turned a merriment lighted face to him. "To walk alone with a young man--between dances--beneath the moon!"

Maria Angelina shuddered and cast impish eyes at heaven.

"Honestly?" Johnny demanded. "Do you mean to tell me you've never walked between dances with young men?"

"I tell you that I have never even danced with a young man until----"

She flashed away from that memory. "Until I came to America. I am not yet in Italian society. I have never been presented. It is not yet my time."

"But--but don't the sub debs have any good times over there? Don't you have dances of your own? Don't you meet fellows? Don't you know anybody?" Johnny demanded with increasing amazement at each new shake of her head.

"Oh, come," he protested. "You can't put that over me. I'll bet you've got a bagful of fellows crazy about you. Don't you ever slip out on an errand, you know, and find some one waiting round the corner----?"

"You are speaking of the customs of my maid, perhaps," said Maria Angelina with becoming young haughtiness. "For myself, I do not go upon errands. I have never been upon the streets alone."

Johnny Byrd stared. With a supreme effort of credulity he envisaged the fact. Perhaps it was really so. Perhaps she was just as sequestered and guileless and inexperienced as that. It was ridiculous. It was amusing.

It was--somehow--intriguing.

With his hand upon her bare arm he drew her closer.

"Ri-Ri--honest now--is this the first----?"

She drew away instinctively before the suppressed excitement of him. Her heart beat fast; her hands were very cold. She knew elation . . . and panic . . . and dread and hope.

It was for this she had come. Young and rich and free! What more would Mamma ask? What greater triumph could be hers?

"I'd like to make a lot of other things the first, too," muttered Johnny.

To Ri-Ri it seemed irrevocable things were being said. But she still held lightly away from him, resisting the clumsy pull of his arm. He hesitated--laughed oddly.

"It ought to be against the law for any girl to look the way you do, Ri-Ri." He laughed again. "I wonder if you know how the deuce you _do_ look?"

"Perhaps it is the moonlight, Signor."

"Moonlight--you look as if you were made of it. . . . I could eat you up, Ri-Ri." His eyes on her red little mouth, on her white, beating throat. His voice had an odd, husky note.

"Don't be such a little frost, Ri-Ri. Don't you like me at all?"