The distinguished critic was far away from the Colonel's town to-night, but the Colonel's party was all that he had complained of; the thing he had felt and tried to account for and explain was here, as it was at all the Colonel's parties, though a discreet selection of outsiders had been admitted to-night; the same sense of effort and tension, of working too hard, of a gayety brilliant but forced--artificial, but justifying the elaborate processes that created it by its charm, like some rare hothouse flower.
You saw it in quick glimpses of passing faces thrown into strong relief by the light of the swinging lanterns, and then dancing out of sight; you heard it in strained, sweet laughter, and felt it in the beat of the music, and in the whole picture the party made of itself in the garden, the restless, changing picture, but this was not all--it was in the air. You could close your eyes and breathe it and feel it. It was unusually keen to-night, real, like a thing you could actually touch and see.
You lost the keen sense of it if you looked too closely for signs of it. If you overheard bits of talk, they were not always clever at all, or even entirely gay. Worried lines showed under elaborate makeup in the women's faces, as if Cinderella had put on white gloves to hide smutty fingers; indeed, though they were trained to forget it and make you forget it, they were only so many Cinderellas, after all. Seen too closely, there was a look of strain about some of the men's faces.
There was a reason for this look to-night, besides the set of reasons which the gentlemen of the Colonel's circle always had for looking worried; living beyond their incomes, living in uncertainty of any income at all, and other private reasons, different in each case, but all quite compelling; there was a reason, and the Colonel's guest of the week before was connected with it. Others would follow him soon, secret conferences would take place unrecorded, the Colonel's private telephone wire would be busy, and the telegrams he received would be frequent and not intelligible to the casual reader. These were the months before election, when the things that were going to happen began to happen. Their beginnings were obscure. The man in the street talked politics, but the man with his hands in the game kept still. Even when they slipped away to the smoking-room, or gathered at the edge of the lawn in groups of two and three that scattered as their host approached, the Colonel's guests were not discussing politics to-night.