"I reckon we'll have to go," said "ma" after her departure, and while the odor of her frightfully-powerful heliotrope scent was still heavy in the room, "though I doubt if I'll be alive by then. Sometimes it seems to me I've just got to knock off and take a clean week in bed. I thought I'd never think of drugs to keep me going, as so many women advise. But I see I'm getting round to it. And I'm getting _that_ fat in the body and _that_ lean in the face! Did you ever see the like? I must 'a' lost three pounds off my face. And the skin's hanging there waiting for it to come back, instead of shrinking. I'm glad my Tom never looks at me. I know to a certainty he ain't looked at me in twenty years. Husbands and wives don't waste much time looking at each other, and I guess it's a good, safe plan."
Mrs. Burke does look badly. I must take better care of her. Cyrus looks badly, too. I haven't seen him to talk to since he made his "strictly business" proposition. I suppose he wants me to realize that he isn't one of the pestering kind. I'm sorry he takes it that way, as I'd have liked to be friends with him. He quarreled so beautifully when we didn't agree. It's a great satisfaction to have some one at hand who both agrees and quarrels in a satisfactory way. But I don't dare make any advances to him. He might misunderstand.
I've just been laughing--at his cowlick. It _is_ such an obstinate little swirl. And when he looks serious it looks so funnily frisky, and when he smiles it looks so fiercely serious and disapproving. Yesterday I hurried suddenly into the little room just off the ball-room, thinking it was empty. But Cyrus and his mother were there, and he was tickling her, and he looked so fond of her, and she looked so delighted. I slipped away without their seeing me.
February 16. We gave our second big ball last night with a dinner for sixty before. It was just half-past five this morning when the last couple came sneaking out from the alcove off the little room beyond the conservatory and, we pretending not to see them, scuttled away without saying good night. Major-General Cutler danced with Mrs. Burke in the opening quadrille, and Mr. Burke danced with the British ambassadress--the ambassador is ill. I had Jim on my hands most of the evening--though I was flirting desperately with little D'Estourelle, he hung to me with a maddening husbandish air of proprietorship. I don't see how I ever endured him, much less thought of marrying him. Cyrus Burke is a king beside him. Excuse me from men who think the fact that they've done a woman the honor of loving her gives them a property right to her. Mrs. Burke was the belle of the ball. She had a crowd of men round her chair all evening, laughing at everything she said.