Mary Minds Her Business Part 9

"Will you mark them with a tick, please--those you can't dance?"

Unsuspectingly she marked them.

"Good!" said he, writing his name against each tick. "We'll sit those out. The next waltz, though, we will dance that."

"But that's engaged--'Chester A. Bradford,'" she read.

"Poor Brad--didn't I tell you?" asked Wally. "He fell downstairs a moment ago and broke his leg."

That was the beginning of it.

The first dance they sat out Wally said to himself, "I shall kiss her, if it's the last thing I ever do."

But he didn't.

The next dance they sat out he said to himself, "I shall kiss her if I never do another thing as long as I live--"

But he didn't.

The last dance they sat out he said to himself, "I shall kiss her if I hang for it."

He didn't kiss her, even then, but felt himself tremble a little as he looked in her eyes. Then it was that the truth began to dawn upon him.

"I'm a gone c.o.o.n," he told himself, and dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief ...

"You've got him, all right," said Helen later, going to Mary's room ostensibly to undress, but really to exchange those confidences without which no party is complete.

"Got who?" asked Mary. And she a Bachelor of Arts!

"Oh, aren't you innocent! Wally Cabot, of course. Did he kiss you?"

"No, he did not!"

"Of course, if you don't want to tell--!"

"There's nothing to tell."

"There isn't? ... Oh, well, don't worry.... There soon will be."

Helen was right.

From that time forward Mary's own shadow was hardly less attentive than Master Wally Cabot. His high-powered roadster was generally doing one of three things. It was either going to Mary's, or coming from Mary's, or taking a needed rest under Mary's porte cochere.

One day Mary suddenly said to her father, "Who was Paul?"

Fortunately for Josiah the light was on his back.

"Last night at the dance," she continued, "I heard a woman saying that I didn't look the least bit like Paul, and I wondered who he was."

"Perhaps some one in her own family," said Josiah at last.

"Must have been," Mary carelessly nodded. They went on chatting and presently Josiah was himself again.

"What are you going to do about Walter Cabot?" he asked, looking at her with love in his sombre eyes.

Mary made a helpless gesture.

"Has he asked you yet?"

"Yes," she said in a m.u.f.fled voice, "--often."

"Why don't you take him?"

Again Mary made her helpless gesture and, for a long moment she too was on the point of opening her heart. But again heredity, training and age-old tradition stood between them, finger on lip.

"I sometimes have such a feeling that I want to do something in the world," she nearly told him. "And if I married Wally, it would spoil it all. I sometimes have such dreams--such wonderful dreams of doing something--of being somebody--and I know that if I married Wally I should never be able to dream like that again--"

As you can see, that isn't the sort of a thing which a girl can very well say to her father--or to any one else for that matter, except in fear and hesitation.

"The way I am now," she nearly told him, "there are ever so many things in life that I can do--ever so many doors that I can open. But if I marry Wally, every door is locked but one. I can be his wife; that's all."

Obviously again, you couldn't expect a girl to speak like that, especially a girl with dreamy eyes and shy. Nevertheless those were the thoughts which often came to her at night, after she had said her prayers and popped into bed and lay there in the dark turning things over in her mind.

One night, for instance, after Wally had left earlier than usual, she lay with her head snuggled on the pillow, full of vague dreams and visions--vague dreams of greatness born of the sunsets and stars and flowers--vague visions of proving herself worthy of the heritage of life.

"I don't think it's a bit fair," she thought. "As soon as a woman marries--well, somehow, she's through. But it doesn't seem to make any difference to the man. He can go right on doing the big things--the great things--"

She stopped, arrested by the sound of a mandolin under her window. The next moment the strains of Wally's tenor entered the room, mingled with the moonlight and the scent of the syringa bush. A murmuring, deep-toned trio accompanied him.

"Soft o'er the fountain Ling'ring falls the southern moon--"

The beauty of it brought a thrill to the roots of Mary's hair--brought quick tears to her eyes--and she was wondering if Wally was right, after all--if love (as he often told her) was indeed the one great thing of life and nothing else mattered, when her door opened and Helen came twittering in.

"A serenade!" she whispered excitedly. "Im-a-gine!"

She tip-toed to the window and, kneeling on the floor, watched the singers through the curtain--knowing well it wasn't for her, but drinking deep of the moment.

Slowly, sweetly, the chorus grew fainter--fainter--

"Nita--Juanita Ask thy soul if we should part--"

"What do you think of that!" said Helen, leaning over and giving her cousin a squeeze and a kiss. "He had the two Garde boys and Will Thompson with him. I thought he was leaving earlier than usual tonight; didn't you? But a serenade! I wonder if the others heard it, too!"

Miss Patty and Miss Cordelia had both heard it, and Helen had hardly gone when they came pattering in--each as proud as Punch of Mary for having caused such miracles to perform--and gleeful, too, that they had lived in the land long enough to hear a real, live serenade. And after they had kissed her and gone, Ma'm Maynard came in with a pretty little speech in French. So that altogether Mary held quite a reception in bed. As one result, her feeling toward Wally melted into something like tenderness, and if it hadn't been for the tragic event next morning, the things which I have to tell you might never have taken place.

"I wonder if your father heard it," said Miss Patty at the breakfast table next morning.

"I wonder!" laughed Mary. "I think I'll run in and see."