Her cavalier found her a corner at a snug little table with three gorgeous matrons. She ate a cutlet and a teaspoonful of peas, took three sips from a glass of champagne, and wound up with some strawberries, which tasted as if they had been taken by mistake out of the pickle-jar.
"I'm afraid you haven't had a very good supper." said her partner, who had been comfortably wedged between two of the matrons, consuming mayonnaise and pâté to his heart's content.
"Excellent, thanks. I shall be glad to make room for someone else." Whereat the unfortunate young man was obliged to stand up, leaving the choicest morsel of truffled goose-liver on his plate.
The crowd in the picture-gallery was thinner when Violet went back. In the doorway she met Roderick Vawdrey.
"Haven't you kept a single dance for me, Violet?" he asked.
"Didn't I? Perhaps I was afraid of Captain Winstanley's displeasure. He would have objected, no doubt."
"Why should he object, unless I broke an engagement to him?"
"Would he not? Are you actually free to be asked by anyone? If I had known that two hours ago! And now, I suppose your programme is full. Yes, to the very last galop; for which, of course, you won't stop. But there's to be an extra waltz presently. You must give me that."
She said neither yes nor no, and he put her hand through his arm and led her up the room.
"Yes. She thinks I am grown. She forgets that I was one-and-twenty when we last met. That does not leave much margin for growing, unless a man went on getting taller indefinitely, like Lord Southminster's palms. He had to take the roof off his palm-house last year, you know. What a dreadful thing if I were to become a Norfolk giant--giants are indigenous to Norfolk, aren't they?--and were obliged to take the roof off Briarwood. Have you seen the Duchess?"
"Only in the distance. I hardly know her at all, you know."
"That's absurd. You ought to know her very well. You must be quite intimate with her by-and-by, when we are all settled down as steady-going married people."
The little gloved hand on his arm quivered ever so slightly. This was a distinct allusion to his approaching marriage.
"Lovely room, isn't it? Just the right thing for a ball. How do you like the Rubens? Very grand--a magnificent display of carmines--beautiful, if you are an admirer of Rubens. What a draughtsman! The Italian school rarely achieved that freedom of pencil. Isn't that Greuze enchanting? There is an innocence, a freshness, about his girlish faces that nobody has ever equalled. His women are not Madonnas, or Junos, or Helens--they are the incarnation of girlhood; girlhood without care or thought; girlhood in love with a kitten, or weeping over a wounded robin-redbreast."
