The Heart of Arethusa Part 26

But this "member of the other s.e.x next whom she was seated at the festive board" was not at all affected by her attempt to make the evening pleasant as Arethusa had been led by the little book to believe he would be; for after a momentary stare, he began to laugh.

He went through all the gamut of mirth. He gurgled. He giggled. He shrieked. He roared. And he even pounded on the table.

"Oh, but this is rich!" he gasped. "My word! But this is rich! It's the very richest thing I ever heard!"

His unseemly merriment attracted the attention of nearly everybody around them.

Arethusa was rather startled by his laughter at first, and then she was infuriated; for she realized that it was laughter directed straight at her. Timothy could have told Mr. Watts that it was very unsafe to laugh at Arethusa; that she hated nothing in the world so much as to be laughed at. Her eyes darkened with anger, and the mirthful one was given the full battery of their wrathful blazing.

But he did not even pause. He laughed on and on, uncontrollably.

So she reached over and pinched him with all the power of strong young fingers on the very fles.h.i.+est part of his arm.

His laughter stopped abruptly. "Say," he exclaimed, "that hurt like fury!"

"I meant it to hurt!" breathed Arethusa, and she turned as far away from him as was possible, owing to the fact that their chairs were so close together.

She was trembling all over with her rage, and he mistook it for weeping.

"I didn't mean to make you cry, Miss Worthington," he began.

Her angry dark eyes flashed around at him for a moment. "I'm not crying!" she announced with emphasis, and then turned away from him again.

But that one brief glance had shown him how far she was from tears.

"Well, I most certainly didn't mean to make you mad," he had only to change the words of his apology. "But ... that was funny!"

"Why?" she demanded, peremptorily, half turning back to face him.

"It just was! You ask your father!" Arethusa's expression remained most unrelenting. "But I really do beg your pardon, in all humbleness, for laughing at you. It was horribly rude of me, I'll have to admit, and I'm certainly sorry that I did it. So do forgive me this time, and let's go on being friends. Please...." he coaxed.

Arethusa softened, just the least bit. "But why was it so funny, what I said? You didn't tell me. Oughtn't I to have said it?"

"It wasn't what you said. There wasn't anything so dead wrong in that.

You could talk about such creatures all you wanted, I suppose, and still not commit anything that wasn't right according to Hoyle. It was the way you handed it out that got my goat so completely!" He gurgled reminiscently. "But listen here, Miss Arethusa, you do just what I'm telling you and you let the natural history alone for the rest of this party, no matter what your book said about it. You can the high-brow stuff from now on, and you'll get along better."

She could plainly tell that every word of this was meant as advice between friends. It was impossible to construe Mr. Watts' manner as anything but eagerness to help. And it sounded delightfully like Timothy in their happier moments.

Her face broke into a forgiving smile.

She informed her repentant neighbor of how he had pleasantly reminded her of Timothy; just who Timothy was, and all about him. Mr. Watts was the personification of absorbed interest. Timothy sounded to him as if he might be a "human being," he declared, and quite worth while.

Arethusa and her adjacent "member of the other s.e.x" managed to get along famously for the rest of the dinner, oblivious to the fact that each had another person on the other side, Mr. Watts because he did not like the girl in blue at his left, and Arethusa because she was almost unconscious that there was anybody else at this table beside their two selves. Mr. Watts was quite sufficient for her entertainment.

As the courses proceeded and Arethusa ate and laughed and chattered away, from time to time her glance roved around the huge dining-room, so gorgeously decorated for this occasion, admiring everything she saw, the diners themselves, as well as the decorations. There were some very pretty girls at this Party, as well as some pa.s.sably handsome men; and Arethusa liked the contrast of the sombre black and white of the men's attiring silhouetted against the gay dresses of the girls near them.

And she liked to watch them as they laughed and talked together.

Among the faces which most interested her was one, a man's face, to which she returned again and again to steal a look. Finally, she asked Mr. Watts to tell her who he was.

"The one next to the girl with the feather fan, at that second table by the pillar."

"Oh, that? That's Gridley Bennet."

There was something in the way he said the name that made Arethusa ask if there was anything wrong with Mr. Bennet.

"Nothing I know of. He's just our prize debutante's delight."

"Why.... What?"

"Lady-killer," he amplified. "All the girls are crazy about him."

"I don't wonder!" Arethusa's own admiration was wholly undisguised by now. "He's the handsomest man I ever saw!" she added recklessly.

"He's handsome enough, I reckon, but he knows it almost too well. And he just hates himself!"

"That's a horrid thing to say about anybody; I don't believe it at all!

And how on earth could he help knowing he's good-looking if he ever looks in the mirror! There's no harm in knowing you're good-looking if you are!"

The subject of this discussion looked far more as those charming gentlemen pictured in the advertising sections of our various current magazines to show the superiority of certain brands of collars and other necessary articles of manly garb were intended to look than the artists have ever been able to make the pictures. He was superbly tall and broad of shoulder; in every way he fulfilled the most exacting requirements of what a Hero should be. No dream of a Prince Charming could have formed a being half so well-fitted for the role as this living Reality.

He wore his faultless dress clothes as if they had been a veritable part of him, not something donned for the few hours of this evening.

And he had gold-tipped eyelashes every bit as long as Arethusa's own (she could tell that they were even so far away as she sat from him), and the most irresistible of smiles. He smiled with commendable frequency. Perhaps he knew that his rows of teeth were as perfect as ordinary human teeth could very well be, and that this superlative smile was in consequence no trifling addition to his other attractions of person. He had a little trick of flinging his head back when he laughed aloud, that showed to still greater advantage all of these wonderful teeth, and his eyelashes, and even called attention to the perfect straightness of his handsome nose.

He laughed for Arethusa's benefit as she watched him, and she smiled in sympathy for such a charming laugh, although she was so far across the room from him she could have no idea why he laughed.

And then she gazed and gazed at him, unashamed; a tiny sigh fluttered through her parted red lips.

"I wish I could meet Him!"

"That's perfectly simple," remarked Mr. Watts. "Introductions haven't gone out yet, as I have heard." His tone was scornful, but it was all lost on Arethusa.

"Could you introduce me?" eagerly.

"I might, if really urged." Then he added, half to himself, "It's a regular slaughter of the innocents whenever Grid Bennet goes to a debutante party. He ought to be barred from 'em by law."

"I think you're jealous of him," said Arethusa reprovingly.

"I haven't a thing to be jealous of him about, and just to prove it, here goes."

And as the Party was all beginning to rise from the tables, Mr. Watts headed straight for Mr. Bennet. He was a trifle disgusted with Arethusa for this display of enthusiasm over Gridley Bennet. His type did not appeal to Mr. Watts very much.

But it certainly did to Arethusa.

A nearer view of Mr. Bennet showed him to her as even handsomer than she had thought at a distance. The Introduction was a Momentous Affair, far more of a Real Event than any introduction in which Arethusa had ever partic.i.p.ated. Mr. Bennet's manner of bending over her hand in his acknowledgment of it called loudly for satin knee breeches and lace ruffles, silver buckled shoon and a decorative sword, as the most appropriate accompaniments. It was delightfully suggestive, to the thrilled Arethusa, of the pages of her favorite novels of those days when ladies' hands were kissed in public.

"Grid's squshy manner would get him anywhere he wanted with the skirts, even if he didn't have the looks to back it up," commented Mr. Watts, with inward dryness, of the meeting.

"I've been watching you for some time, Miss Worthington," was Mr.

Bennet's flattering opening to the conversation, "and I was planning an introduction to you just as soon as dinner was over."