But during meals all unpleasant subjects were vetoed. Rosemary would have none of them, and her wishes, as the honoured guest, were law in this hospitable house. These good people, with their mercurial temperament, had a wonderful gift of casting aside trouble and giving themselves over to the pleasures of the moment. And so at dinner in the evenings the gipsy band not yet driven forth out of the neighbouring village would discourse sweet music, the tender, sad Hungarian refrains that appeal to the stranger almost as much as they do to the native.
Rosemary, who was an exquisite dancer, longed to tread the measure of the csàrdàs, the Hungarian national dance, which begins with a dreamy, languorous slow movement, and then suddenly breaks into a wild, mad whirl, wherein the dancers' eyes glow with excitement, their cheeks burn like fire, and their breath comes and goes through quivering, parted lips. Surely the merriest, maddest, most intoxicating dance devised by a passionate people--probably for the letting off of some inward steam that must find vent in such rapturous movements from time to time, or it would consume them with its glow.
"I think Lady Tarkington is quite splendid," Maurus Imrey said to Jasper, in the intervals of beating time with hand and foot to the ever-quickening measure of the dance. "Hey, you confounded gipsy!" he cried, shouting to the swarthy, perspiring leader of the band. "Quicker! Quicker! Can't you hear me speak? Do you think you are playing a funeral march?"
"I think," Jasper put in, with his quiet smile, "if the musicians put on any more speed, Rosemary for one will be crying 'Mercy!'"
But for the moment Rosemary showed no sign of crying any such thing. Her nimble feet had quickly caught the quaint, syncopated rhythm, and Philip was a magnificent teacher. Perhaps there was some truth in the saying that he had inherited a strain of gipsy blood, for indeed when he danced the _csàrdàs_ there was something barbaric about his movements. They were full of grace and perfect in rhythm, but all the time they gave the impression of wild roamings through desert lands, of a will that brooked no fetters and was a law unto itself. Rosemary gave herself wholly to the pleasure of being whirled round, turned and twisted, sometimes lifted off her feet. All intellectuality fell away from her for the time being: she was just like a young and beautiful animal in enjoyment of the senses kind Nature had given her, the sound of that intoxicating music, the feeling of unfettered movement, the scent of dying roses in huge vases, that sent their sweet indefinable fragrance through the heat-laden air.