“These sort of half-and-half affairs are ghastly,” he remarked, as he took my cup. “Don’t you think so?”
“No; I do not,” I answered bravely, for this fine old house, crowds of gay, well-dressed people, delicious strains of a string band, lights, flowers, pictures, were to my mind extremely enjoyable. “But, of course, I should prefer a real dance.”
“And I should _not_,” he rejoined energetically. “Here, at least, you can sneak away and go to sleep in a comfortable armchair; but at what you call a ‘real dance,’ upon my word, the way in which hostesses drive and hustle one about is enough to call for the intervention of the police or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and, if you stand against a wall, people trample on your feet!” At the mere recollection of his sufferings, he almost looked as if he was going to cry.
“The remedy is in your own hands,” I replied unfeelingly. “_Dance._”
“No, no,”—shaking his head,—“not if I know it. I don’t mind sitting out now and then, just to oblige; but I draw the line at dancing. I’m too old.”
I gazed at him in amazement. He could not be more than four or five-and-twenty at the most.
“Then why do you go to dances, where you are so cruelly ill-used?” I asked; “hustled, as you say, and driven about and trampled on?”
“Oh, I only go when duty calls me, and, thank goodness, that is not often. When the ball is given by one’s cousin’s cousin, or one’s aunt, or some old pal of my governor’s.”
“Alive! I should think so! And a younger man than I am. _He_ dances, so does my mother.”
“Really! And you go about in a bath-chair?”
“Well, not just _yet_. I’m not altogether so feeble as I look”—in a bantering tone. “I say, are you staying in the house?”
“Then”—with much animation—“did you notice if it was freezing when you came along?”
“Then that’s all right. You see, the hounds meet here to-morrow, the best draw at this side of the county, and the country is all plain sailing, very sound going. You hunt, of course?”
“Don’t I? Every one hunts down here. I’ve had fifty days this winter already.”
“Oh, then you are not too decrepit to ride?” I inquired.
He stared at me for a second, and burst into a roar of laughter as he answered—
“I hunt six days a week regular; there’s nothing to touch it.”