VEN ties had been ruined in the knotting while Alden Brooks made himself ready for the Underhills' dinner. He had gone on abstractedly, taking another fresh tie as fast as one proved to be a hopeless failure, without realizing that the dinner-hour was dangerously near.
Whether Myrtle's photograph in the frame of the mirror, or his own image in the glass, more affected the trend of his soliloquy, it would be hard to say, but surely he thought he was thinking of Myrtle. The sight of the two faces so near together had sent him off into a reverie, however, that began and ended with the thought that she was decidedly pretty. There was no doubt whatever about that; she had, indeed, acknowledged it herself very candidly, for she had got into the way of calling the conventionally unconscious pose an affectation, and had made instead a fad of frankness.
Myrtle Leicester had, besides beauty, style and character, and at the fifth tie Alden had paused to class her mentally as between an "awfully nice girl" and a "thoroughbred," having neither the merely negative virtues of the one nor the supercivilized fiber of the other. She was the sort of girl that well became a divan and an after-dinner tête-à-tête. She was not "difficult"—that was one thing Alden thought he liked about her. She did not exhaust him in conversation, being rather a gentle tonic than a stimulant. She was agile enough, however, and always had an answer of the hit-or-miss sort ready, and she laughed merrily, if somewhat indiscriminately, at all his jokes.
They had got to be very good friends in the last few months, and had been together a great deal, indoors and out, for she was quite the sort of girl with whom a man—an Alden Brooks, at least—likes to be seen. And now he began to wonder where he was with her. The frontier between friendship and love, he thought, is a very dangerous and perplexing territory—a debatable land of ambuscades and precipices. Into this border-land he had rashly wandered, and having been unobservant of the landmarks, it had been some time before he had discovered that he was lost, and in no small danger of being surrounded by the enemy, with all escape cut off.
To put it very plainly, Alden had begun to wonder if he was in love with Myrtle Leicester. The mere fact of his wondering about it, he thought, was a symptom of the beginning of the end—a sad commentary on his inexperience. By the time he had begun on his seventh tie he had confessed that he was in danger, seeing that she was seldom out of his thoughts for many hours at a time; and yet, despite her fascination for him, there was something lacking in her that he could not, nor did he try to, formulate. If she were not so pretty, he thought, he might settle it easier; for he was not willing to admit that that was her chief attraction, yet it was by certain poses of her head that he always recalled her. He tried to analyze her charms and to think of her objectively,—rather a hard thing for an Alden Brooks to do,—but he invariably ended by deciding that he could live without her, which, he considered, was tantamount to not being in love.
He put down his brush at last, and gave the photograph a careful inspection under the gaslight. His farewell look, however, was directed toward the mirror, and was unedged with the sharp criticism of the other. "She is pretty," he admitted, and that seemed to be the only definite thing he could say on the subject.
His reverie had taken so long that he was barely on time at the Underhills', and as soon as he arrived the company was complete. After a few introductions he was taken up to Miss Ringgold, whose partnership he had been promised for dinner. He had heard of Miss Ringgold before, and he had looked forward with some little curiosity to the meeting. He had even taken the pains to buy a copy of "The Forty-Eleventh Way" the day before, and had read it with a great deal of interest and amusement, quite forgetting that his original purpose had been merely to attempt to "get at" her through her work. He had not succeeded in "getting at" her as much as he had hoped, and save the general feeling that she must be very clever, he had secured little bait for the conversational fishing that he anticipated.