II
All this was at a summer resort, which was called the Green Chalybeate. Stella and I and others of our age attended the hotel hops in the evening with religious punctuality, 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.