The picture of the Emerson's tenants which Dade drew struck a pang in Emily's sociological conscience. She pitied the girl more for her inability to estimate the evils of a system which left her free to wander over the earth seeking that exercise which her clamoring muscles demanded, while those upon whose labors she lived had to exercise more than their overwrought muscles required than she did for the remote prospect of her being doomed to labor on the corn lands of Polk County.
"I'd go down to Zimmerman's saloon and bowl, if it wouldn't shock you all to death. But tell me, how do you feel about it?"
"_Mon Dieu_, no--about the terrible _exposé_ of that interesting protégé of yours? _On ne pourrait le croire--c'est affreux!_"
"Well, no," Emily said, with a woeful laugh, "if I understand your French."
"What!" exclaimed the girl. "I thought you were so deeply interested in him. Haven't you worked hard to give him some sort of social form, getting him to dawnces and all that sort of thing?"
"No, not to dances, Dade. He doesn't dance."
"Oh, to be suah. I heahd that--and I heahd--" she gave a ringing laugh--"I heahd that he was downright jealous when you went to visit Sallie Van Stohn in St. Louis and dawnced with all those men theah. And I didn't blame him--those St. Louis men are raeally lovely dawncers, bettah than the Chicago men--they have the _mesure_ but not the _grâce_--though the St. Louis men are nothing at all to the German officers we met at Berlin. Why, my dyah, those fellows can waltz across a ball room with a glass of wine on each hand--raeally!" She stretched out her well-turned arms and held their pink palms up, to picture the corseted terpsichorean. "But why didn't you teach him to dawnce?"
Emily did not conceal with her little laugh the blush that came at this reminder of her attempts to overcome Garwood's pride, which had rebelled at the indignity of displaying his lack of grace in efforts at the waltz or the easier two-step.
"How stupid! But that's nothing now to this othah thing. Had you evah dreamed of such a thing? I thought from what you wrote me that he was the soul of honah."
"So he is!" declared Emily, lifting eyes that blazed a defiance.
"But won't it injure his chawnces of election?"