"And so shall I," she gibed--but the gibe itself was almost a caress. "Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be fresh and rested for it."
"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity patient, and----"
"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine affectation of austere hostess-ship. "_I_ say you are to come down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will come."
"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.
It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side; easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the social sense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.
For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself--and any lingering trace of self-consciousness--in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there could be no possible Wahaskan demand.
"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of you"--piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and you needn't meet any more people than you want to."