There were no lectures that night, for Richard had done his best,
talking at least twenty times with both Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Colonel
Tophevie, whom he found more agreeable than he had supposed. Then he had
held Ethelyn's white cloak upon his arm, and stood patiently against the
wall, while up at the United States she danced set after set--first, the
Lancers, with young Lieutenant Gray, then a polka with John Tophevie,
and lastly, a waltz with Frank Van Buren, who whirled his fair partner
about the room with a velocity which made Richard dizzy and awoke sundry
thoughts not wholly complimentary to that doubtful dance, the waltz.
Richard did not dance himself, at least not latterly. In his younger
days, when he and Abigail Jones attended the quilting-frolics together
and the "paring bees," he had with other young men, tried his feet at
Scotch reels, French fours, "The Cheat," and the "Twin Sisters," with
occasionally a cotillion, but he was not accomplished in the art. Even
the Olney girls called him awkward, preferring almost anyone else for a
partner, and so he abandoned the floor and cultivated his head rather
than his heels. He liked to see dancing, and at first it was rather
pleasant watching Ethelyn's lithe figure gliding gracefully through the
intricate movements of the Lancers; but when it came to the waltz, he
was not so sure about it, and he wondered if it were necessary for Frank
Van Buren to clasp her as tightly about the waist as he did, or for her
to lean so languidly upon his shoulder.
Richard was not naturally jealous--certainly not of Frank Van Buren; but
he would rather his wife should not waltz with him or any other man, and
so he said to her, asking this concession on her part in return for all
he had promised to attempt; and to Ethelyn's credit we record that she
yielded to her husband's wishes, and, greatly to Frank's surprise,
declined the waltz which he had proposed the following evening. But she
made amends in other dances, keeping poor Richard waiting for her night
after night, until he actually fell asleep and dreamed of the log cabin
on the prairie, where he had once danced a quadrille with Abigail Jones
to the tune of Money-musk, as played by the Plympton brothers--the one
on a cracked violin, and the other on an accordion.
A tap of Mrs. Tophevie's fan brought him back to consciousness, and he
was almost guilty of a sigh as the log cabin faded from his vision, with
the Plymptons and Abigail Jones, leaving instead that heated ballroom,
with its trained orchestra, its bevy of fair young girls, its score of
white-kidded dandies with wasp-like waists and perfumed locks, and Ethie
smiling in their midst.
Saratoga did not agree with Richard. He grew sick first of the water;
then of the fare; then of the daily routine of fashionable follies; then
of the people; and then, oh! so sick of the petty lectures which Ethelyn
gradually resumed as he failed in his attempts to imitate Frank Van
Buren and appear perfectly at ease in everybody's presence. Saratoga was
a "confounded bore," he said, and though he called himself a brute, and
a savage, and a heathen, he was only very glad when toward the last of
August Ethelyn became so seriously indisposed as to make a longer stay
in Saratoga impossible. Newport, of course, was given up, and Ethelyn's
desire was to go back to Chicopee and lie down again in the dear old
room which had been hers from childhood. Aunt Barbara's toast, Aunt
Barbara's tea, and Aunt Barbara's nursing, would soon bring her all
right again, she said; but in this she was mistaken, for although the
toast, and the tea, and the nursing each came in its turn, the September
flowers had faded, and the trees on the Chicopee hills were beginning to
flaunt their bright October robes ere she recovered from the low,
nervous fever, induced by the mental and bodily excitement through which
she had passed during the last three or four months.