“Drewena,” she said quietly, with slow sarcasm, “it would be a pleasure to meet your friend. She is very pretty in yellow. Did Carrie make the dress?” Roberta’s lip curled. Once more her hand moved convulsively in her muff.
Without a word Miriam stepped up close and running her fingers down Roberta’s arm, slipped her own hand well inside the tiny fur. Roberta shook her off; but Miriam, now looking at her friend as though intrigued, said slowly, “Perhaps you’d like another cocktail, Roberta. It will warm you. Your hands are like ice.”
Drewena looked on, but finding the scene too difficult to interpret, shook her head sadly, murmured something about the program and led Miriam away.
Roberta, still brooding, was left alone in her corner.
Standing by the piano, Drewena clapped her hands and the crowd grew quiet.
“First,” she said, “since Sophie is not ready, I’ll ask Daisy, who has come in her perennial form of the ‘Prairie Flower’ to sing for us.”
Docky sniffed and whispered to Beulah, “Look at her! She doesn’t even have to make up for the part! My dear, do I _have_ to listen to that miserable dentist do her wild flower act again? It’s just been repeated and repeated till I could simply scream! Imagine, trying to carry on at _her_ age when we _all_ know she’s well into the menopause!”
Daisy, however, tripped across the floor, her black taffeta dress flouncing around her wide hips. After bowing to the somewhat bored and suffering crowd, she put her hands to her shoulders and bent her knees. In a stringy voice she sang—
“I’m a little Prairie Flower Growing wilder every hour! No one here to care about me— I’m as wild as wild can be!”
Then she put one hand on the top of her head, and the other on her hip. Jigging up and down to the music of the piano, she began to rotate on her toes. The frayed voice continued—
“I’m a little patchwork quilt All my edges trimmed in gilt! No one here to cuddle with me— I’m as cuddly as can be!”
There was loud, determined clapping, and Daisy ran off the floor, her face suffused with blushes.
“Perfectly grand, dear,” said one of the guests. “So much sweeter than the _first_ time you gave it.”
“_That_ won’t last,” said Beulah, looking at Daisy who had returned to the room and was holding someone’s hand, obviously searching the face of her friend for signs of approval. “It won’t last—I’ve been all through it.”